War With A Mate - Ep 12: Everest

Episode Date: February 21, 2025

Today we visit an alternate reality where the guys successfully talk about the game for an extended period of time - before making room for the very first official segment of the podcast. My, how they’ve grown! Newfound motivation is nurtured in some unity, absolutely nothing can go wrong now.

welcome to war with a mate this is the podcast which works as a companion piece to me james and you andy you andy what do you like andy playing the game the campaign for north africa we're going to be playing it to completion you already know that though being here this long a nice even dozen of these episodes is what today marks and what what a day it's been yeah fairly eventful day well not really in games terms we're doing the hedging we do at the start of every episode should we just not say this part anymore they know where we're going with it but we've been doing bits and pieces around the game the game looks a bit different now though It looks very different.

I bought five picture frames. And they are big picture frames. If you know anything about the game, which you should by now, come on, the individual five pieces of the map that make up the big, long, 10-foot map, 9-foot map, now they're all in individual picture frames, all five of them, lined up alongside each other like some piece of beautiful art. Yeah, and we've moved from the floor to a series of tables and benches

and piles of books. Yeah, you've got everything stacked up. i came in and it looked it looked sublime just a row of five picture frames housing these pristine maps everything looked gorgeous and it has remained gorgeous we didn't knock any over we didn't smash the picture frames no no grubby fingerprints on the maps anymore no that happened before but now it won't now it won't now we can't and we will get them on the picture frames obviously oh yeah but that's what i thought yeah they're there to get all grimy and then once a month we'll wipe them down we'll we'll we'll wear our tank tops and we'll roll them up

uh so i love our tank top so our bellies are on show oh god then we'll we'll wet ourselves up sorry we'll not wet ourselves the oh this this has got away from me a little bit i'm painting a very unpleasant picture everything looks great and no one's wet themselves in a tank shot they've rolled up. No one's done that. Everything's clean. And there won't be ever. Let alone monthly. Oh, right. Maybe once.

No. Just once. It's a firm rule of mine. I'm going to ply you with some alcohol and some caffeine. So I guess Buckfast. Or a vodka Red Bull. Or an Espresso Martini. A what? An Espresso? You mean Espresso. Yeah, sure.

Haven't you learned from Sabrina Carpenter? No. You haven't learned anything from her no she's not a great teacher wow wow that's i'll move past that oh i'm sorry what has she taught you she's taught taught me all about um you know she doesn't know much about desperation can't relate to it what's that taught you um well i'm desperate to finish the game so i've clearly not learned much from her i'm desperate to get to the end of this how little you relate to yeah i can't relate to suprena carpenter that's fine we've not got much in common no talent she doesn't have a podcast oh she might actually no she probably does also

everyone has a podcast they let us have one yeah the guys the podcast yeah they were really generous to let us have this yeah and we use it to talk tangentially about the game yeah mostly the other stuff but in terms of the game i now understand how shipping works again just in the context of the game yeah don't go and start on real supply lines but yeah this is only get a grasp of the fictional ones yeah this isn't the mersk podcast this is this is the campaign for north africa podcast the one and only as well i think no one else is doing this rightly so the shipping stuff was actually not as grueling as i thought it was going to be when we sat down and had a look through it i was pretty tentative pretty worried that it was going to be a lot more

complicated but it really just boils down to i get to ship this many tons of things every turn where do i want to ship them to and in this practice scenario it's boiled down even even simpler because instead of the usual six shipping lanes i get in the main game i only get half of that just get three of them yeah so it's pretty simple yeah i just choose where i'm going to ship things to do with those three lanes and you at the start of each turn get a chance to bomb those shipping convoys and therefore reduce a bunch of the supplies that are going to show up in tabrook benghazi and tripoli yeah on the shower and i also found out that it's a realistic possibility i can use my transport planes to fly all the way over to tripoli pick up some supplies bring them back

home and i can also use the boats which i didn't know i had until today yeah you got three boats i got four isn't one of them stuck in a harbor no so i get i got four coastal shipping boats right one of them is a capacity of two thousand the other three of one thousand each and i also have the san giorgio i believe it is something i've made reference to in the past but didn't really understand what it was what it is is a half-sunken italian warship which is just outside Tobruk's port, which reduces the capacity of Tobruk's port, but it does mean if your ships get near, I'm going to

shoot them with my boat. The boat can't move. You've got lots of warships. I've just got one. Can't move it, but I can fire at you with it, so watch out. Stay away. I'm just going to avoid that. What is it that Pete says in Friends when he's

trying to become the ultimate fighting champ and he's in the full body cast? Oh, uh, chef. yeah yeah yeah that's not what he says he goes oh chef he doesn't turn around and just say oh chef which would be great uh for shadowing for well for chef when i came out the documentary about the making of iron man i don't think that's what the film is it is it's a it's a metaphor explain to me right now and i'm going to put you on the spot we're not going anywhere until you do tell me what a metaphor is right now it's when a thing is you don't use the word like or ask

because then it's a simile but it's a simile that doesn't use the words like or ask uh sweet summer child you know what fine because i couldn't say it any better myself i would also use the word simile twice in the description of what a metaphor is it's when a thing's not really a thing but you pretend it is a thing poor art it's when words gaslight you I keep doing that we need to get rid of them

I think you're just easily confused which we weren't today god it just felt like real good smooth sailing and hey a lot of it was boat related today we did a lot of boat stuff this is the most boat related stuff we've done so far and in a desert campaign

that makes perfect sense yeah although it's weird boats are going to be the most important thing maybe Trucks. Trucks are the most important. Boats are... Trucks to the sea. They're trucks to the sea. They're aqua trucks. Yeah, so they're the second most important.

Yeah, they're just big trucks with no wheels and a bow. Normally a captain. A stern? A stern man on the ship. Stern man. An angry man. All of my boats are manned by fascists. Is that a personal choice? no it's historically accurate

you think there were non-fascists on those boats probably yeah there's probably a few you flee the fascist land and live on the open ocean shipping things for fascists it's exclusively coastal shipping they're tied right to the shoreline

of the North African campaign so everything they're doing relates directly to the shore they're not in open water so I guess yes they're all fascists they're all fascist sea captains fascists fear the open sea that's where Davy Jones can get them

yeah the natural enemy of the fascists have you ever gazed upon the green flash Master Gibbs no I haven't you're the Master Gibbs to my monkey you know the monkey

we named the monkey Jack yeah you're a little monkey well the monkey didn't have a little monkey captain barbosa had a little monkey the best guy in the show the show the show the best guy in the films what captain barbosa yeah jeffrey rush yeah you think so yeah he also played he's the guy having the most fun he also played casanova frankenstein in the film mystery men it's actually casanova frankenstein's monster oh that is a sophisticated joke the everyman won't really get that because most people

actually misinterpret it and think that the monster is very high the monster's not actually called frankenstein you fucking idiots he's called casablanca oh who loves you baby Is that a reference? It's Telly Savalas Oh No, not a big fan? No

Well, you know You also don't like Sabrina Carpenter So you are somewhere in the middle of that spectrum The Telly Savalas to Sabrina Carpenter The scientists are still looking into it They're still not sure They're still not sure how that happened i'd say i'm more chaotic sabrina it's not the only thing that they're not sure on did you hear

about the baby that was born with a glass head what doctors are still looking into it you like that one yeah well you're welcome a little gift from me to you so beyond the shipping we also looked at distribution of airfields and putting our planes in them i got all of my squadrons ordered today same every single one all of our airships and our wet ships are distributed wherever they need to go and now i just need to put the things on my wet ships and sail them to libya so they can be transported around by your dry ships but yeah by my dry ships by my wheel ships i like to call them so everything is in working order i know what i'm getting i know where i'm putting it i know who i'm

giving it to it's to my planes it's to my men who are all on the board now in the picture frames everything is coming at millhouse i can't see how this could go wrong like two months ago i asked you do you know what you're doing with your face and then you panicked i did i did is that panic sort of resolved a little you know what god it actually has i actually feel like i know what i'm going to be doing good this is a huge step anyone who's been listening to this up to this point knows how frantically terrified i was of this game and i am still a little bit unsettled mostly because i found more sort of jokey asides that the rule book made reference to earlier but overall i do think this is looking like a game that can be played well it has to be everybody everybody

make such a big deal out of this game yeah it only took us three months to get ready but we are we know the rules now yeah the only thing i was sort of unsure about was the shipping stuff now it's just a case of oh there is one of the thing that i'm still a little bit iffy on and it's replacement points which is where you can if your men get injured you can ship in replacements and i'm still a little bit iffy on that but i wholeheartedly think apart from that i know how the game functions yeah most of the headline stuff like we'll figure that out prisoners are probably gonna be a thing yeah come to think of it prisoners we've read through we know what the rules look like and yeah it's it's fairly straightforward they just take up resources when

you got them captured but we we did we did that in the practice turn that we did of combat where we found out how many men were lost a lot it was a lot a lot of men were injured and captured yeah so we we have a we've tried that so hopefully when we revisit it it just feels like a trip down memory lane so i'm predicting some pretty ineptly run prison yeah yeah well i mean you have to feed them this is this is a bit of a yeah it's slightly you can't go eastern front on this yeah yeah i was going to refer to it as a slightly nicer environment compared to other the hell on it yeah yeah i'm really hesitant to call this a nice environment because i mean desert warfare no it's brutal it's just there was worse stuff going on which is horrible

to think about we you know what it's like the four major theaters it might be the best one yeah well four major theaters so you've got the eastern front yeah western front yeah pacific this. Yeah, that's a good point. Pacific's a nightmare. What was the worst about the Pacific? I mean, it's all jungle hellholes. You're more likely to die

of dengue fever than getting shot. Brutal island-to-island fighting. Oh, yeah. Jumping around Archipelago would be horrible. And a bunch of people fighting on behalf of a sun god so they'll never surrender. Yeah, that's the last thing

you really want to come up against in any war it's a zealot yeah because that's just a yeah you can't really walk your way around that one there's no no quarter well they did end up island hopping them which is just this island's not strategically important let's miss it which i feel like this game will go in a similar way just with huge swathes of the desert yeah being just a non-viable option we start the game with so many people grouped together ready to fight so my plan as i was talking to you about today since we've been we've been very transparent with how our plans are looking this early on a lot of my plans is to get as many resources as possible readily available that doesn't rely on trucks so i can just ship stuff wild move i just want to have

such minimal truck involvement to begin with so i can slowly learn the trucks as we go which i know is completely counter to everything we've been saying i like how so to not learn the trucks which seem to be a relatively simple system you're gonna master shipping things via air and sea yeah to avoid the thing the game's built around yeah absolutely i want to make sure that i'm getting things safe and just ready to go instead i don't know how my strategy adapts when you've said fuck the trucks yeah but you said fuck the trucks as in you need to fuck up the trucks you need to destroy them yes but if there aren't any i don't know what to do fuck the planes the boats you know what because again what came up again today you may remember everyone the camels and

the rule about shipping camels dead camels living camels more discussion on that yeah we were trying to wax about that because we were looking at the rules to airdrop supplies and you can airdrop supplies you can fly your planes over you can drop them into sort of areas where people are actually in combat i can airdrop supplies to my men that are fighting your men and it it says you can only airdrop certain things which are stores so you know food and stuff and ammunition and i was trying to figure out if dead camels fall into either of those it doesn't say anywhere there's just dead camels so because i was thinking if you could airdrop dead camels into a sort of fighting area into a conflict

zone. You could use them as sandbags. I feel like it would be brutal on morale if you're just hiding in a foxhole and then a camel lands on your mate. That would be... You're talking about the

worst way to die in the middle of warfare. It might be the most confusing. Andy, it's 16 minutes in. We're still talking about the game. Unprecedented. We did briefly talk about Sabrina Carpenter, but wow. We looped back to the game pretty quickly. I just wanted to say congratulations.

That's fantastic work on our part. We've done it. Wow, 17 minutes. You people, oh. The thing is, at this point, everyone who's listening is used to us not talking about the game. All the hardcore game fanatics, they tuned out a while ago. So now we're just alienating everyone else. Now we're alienating the people who don't care about the board game.

And just want to hear the words of wisdom that we have to share. What a thing to strike. Well, in a little while, we've actually got a bit of a treat for everyone, haven't we? We've decided on a segment that we're going to... Yeah, we're going to trial some segments, see how structure feels. Oh, God. What is going on today? We are firing on all cylinders.

We've got the map in picture frames. We've got a segment to try out. We're ready to go. The next thing we do will be on the actual game tin. Yeah, the next thing we do is just play in the... No I'm not saying it I'm not saying it I'm going to go at least one episode without saying it

We're going to start that Part of the round So it means My stuff being bombed by your guys And me bombing some of your stuff Which is exciting All of the off map stuff Because we start off with all of the

Yeah because the map's only 10 foot long And 3 foot tall So why would all the action be happening on it well we were talking about it earlier because the game has a sort of editor's note section where they talk about other stuff they wanted to include which you brought to my attention unfortunately and it included stuff like condition of bakeries in italy around the time of the war and how that was going to affect food chain supplies yeah north africa and someone rightfully walked into the office and went pack it in you were meant to release this like six years ago

i feel like just you saying that there have we been possessed by the spirit of spi when the company fell apart did some sort of haunting happen in the the particular version of the game we're playing the game with the same intensity they designed it with yeah and the same level of procrastination where we just keep putting it off with other aspects of and there's air quotations going on here creativity where we're just fucking around with other things near the game and not really making the progress we should in the time scale we promised i mean yes that's what's happening cool i just wanted to say that on live mike yeah yeah but yeah i'm ready i'm ready for it yeah you've got a lot of planes more way more than i thought you did i've got 133 of one

particular type of bomber. I don't think I have that many planes in total. Yeah, you really don't have anywhere near as many planes as me. Air superiority, baby! But all your planes are broken at the start. Most of my planes are broken, and I'm not allowed to fix them for the first turn. Way. That's a horrible

rule that they've implemented. But I gotta go first. Sorry, I gotta choose who goes first. It's gonna be me. Oh, it is gonna be you. In the words of NSYNC, it's gonna be me. oh no I've I've

shouldn't have done that sorry yeah you're not happy about that come with a screeching halt well that was productive for about 20 minutes and now by the most yeah now we're treading water are you going to tell us a story about a recent excursion

I think yeah I was going to talk to you about it earlier on but I thought well I'll talk to you about it it for the pod. Save it for the pod. It's completely unrelated to the game. It's because you asked me about if I saw the halftime show for the Super Bowl.

Just to date this. Yeah, so the Super Bowl has just happened fairly recently. Go birds. And I was down in, I was in the city of Birmingham when the Super Bowl occurred. I mean, obviously

I assume you went there to watch the game. That's why I went. i went there i went there to see a band and i i experienced a very very long bus journey to get there because i thought what's better than paying a lot of money for a short train journey paying no money at all basically for a very long coach journey so that was a that was an endeavor so i i was in birmingham and i went to a gig and then after the gig i was in the taxi on the way back to the hotel and realized that it was a sunday night so everywhere was going to be closed but the big game was on but the big game was on but i completely forgot the super bowl was on because i

don't follow american sports or any sports really i was in the uber on the way back to the hotel i was like is there anywhere that's still open tonight and the guy was like i'm gonna call my friend because he works on the doors sometimes so he called his other uber friend okay and they're on the phone was he definitely an uber friend what do you say he said he's also a taxi driver okay so he called his friend and was like i've got a i've got a passenger here and he's asking if anywhere will be open tonight and they were talking about all these locations that i didn't know and then they eventually settled on a bar and my uber driver went yeah i'll take you there i'll get you there now so he cancelled the ride just switched it off and then started going

down all these like side streets and i was like hmm then i got a notification from uber saying you're don't go to a second location it said your trip ended unexpectedly is everything okay and i was like i'll let you know in five minutes yeah i was like i don't want to say it's not okay because at the moment all that's going on is a charitable excursion from this guy so i don't want to say something's going wrong i'll wait it out but you might get out the car and get mated in which case you won't be able to leave her yeah that's true so it's a sort of double-edged sword but nonetheless i stuck through with it and we arrived at a bar and it was have you seen the film coyote ugly i know of it well the bar was called coyote ugly oh nice a nice reference

so i went into coyote ugly how's the sunday night shift at coyote ugly well outside a woman handed me a card with a sort of free shot token on okay you get a free shot and i was like all right cool so i went in expecting i mean you know over the film coyote ugly i'm now expecting you know the in between us phil well funny you say that because through the doors of coyote ugly what i find is uh about three people in this bar real ranchers two of them were staff road dogs two of them were staff and i'm i'm disappointed to report none of them were dancing on the bar to various hits from the late 90s early 2000s instead they were just sort of stood two of them chatting behind the bar while somebody enjoyed a quiet sunday night drink so i went over to the bar

and it's like oh i've got this this token for a free shot like oh you do have to buy a drink to get the free shot and i was like well to be fair yeah i wasn't going to just cash in this one free shot and coyote ugly i mean it was tempting to just turn back around immediately to be fair i would have left but i was like well i've just had a taxi journey that i don't think i was charged for and i still need to check that actually i don't know if i was charged for that journey so i i sat down had my my uh my actual drink and my free shot and then thought you know what maybe this isn't the place to stay so next door next door popped and arrived at it was like an australian american sports bar it was a weird mixture that place was rammed well of course

like absolutely rammed like barely a space to like maneuver through the tables maneuver maneuver through the tables and the super bowl was on so sat down the halftime show had just started yeah so samuel l jackson up on the screen i thought right here we go this this could be good and spent a good while there and saw the halftime show was really good enjoyed that yeah not really a Kendrick Lamar fan don't like listen to his music but brilliant show put on and yeah so all in all thank you Birmingham taxi driver for taking me close to the bar that I went to so he clearly wasn't a Super Bowl fan as well otherwise he would have known immediately to take me there but all in all yeah it worked out well so briefly thought I was getting kidnapped in the end saw a pretty

spectacular halftime show and a very lacklustre game if you watched it i didn't really pay much attention to the game to be honest it was sort of halftime show and i'm not like i say i don't follow many sports at all so american football sort of lost on me i just i just enjoyed the atmosphere to be fair nice place good vibe good drinks and that was that was it that was the evening all in all good time good time and you you watched it uh not live by the sounds of it No, I caught it after I watched the highlights of the game And then the halftime show

Probably the way to do it Yeah, the halftime show was better than the game Because you follow American sports fairly I follow American football I don't watch basketball or baseball Yeah, the other two sports Well, they have ice hockey as well But those are all of the sports in America, I believe

I mean, pretty much, yeah Those are the biggies So yeah, American football is fine if you're watching highlights But otherwise it's just adverts Because it's like a four-hour game you just get the like 20 minutes that are good what it's played over a very small space of time isn't it but everything's like stopping it's like 60 minutes of actual time like 4 15 minutes but there's so many like clock stoppages and stuff it takes like three four hours for a game which

explains why it felt like it went on so long for me after the halftime show i mean yeah because it did yeah another two hours by the sounds of it it was also basically decided at halftime that it was The second half was pretty much pointless. I can't even attest to what the score was at that point, so yeah, I can't say I paid much attention to it, but entertaining show. An all-around pleasant time.

I do like he's just blasting his rival at the biggest show of the year. Yeah, that clip of him when he's glaring down the camera when he calls out Drake. I had to look into that a little bit

afterwards because i didn't really get the the beef i don't really know what the background was on that i'm still a little bit hazy on it but i get i get the sentiment of what he was trying to say and the sort of things he he pulled out the bag to do it and uh i mean it's it's quite the public spectacle to uh get back at someone so i guess yeah that's waldo big big big drama yeah yeah whereas here nothing but nothing but peace which i guess brings me onto onto our segment that we had an idea for which is all centered around the fact that we're going to be doing this for a long time and almost all of it is going to be us at each other's throats yeah and even when we've been recording for the last 12 episodes i feel like a lot of it has been us disagreeing with

each other it's been a lot of whether it's been about fast food conventions whether it's been about the game itself whether it's been about just anything we talk about we've disagreed a lot so i thought that instead we should maybe try and find a bit of common ground yeah i think it's a good idea to stop this so we remain friends throughout this process so so common ground and now for something nicer a little oasis in the war it's time for some common ground i'm trying to interrupt the common ground i'm recording maybe so the idea behind common ground common ground each yeah you yeah yeah that little yeah nice

so we're gonna each week one of us is going to be tasked we're going to alternate with bringing an idea at the table that we we simply just can't disagree on something that we think the other person is just so insympatico that we're going to definitely agree on it and it means that we each week get this nice little oh okay i've misunderstood this right what did you think it was i thought it was something we disagreed on that we wanted common ground on okay well maybe so well we can try that too okay as long as we can try and get to a common ground but i guess if anything then this is me starting off easy because this week i've volunteered to go first and i think i've got us a common ground andy okay my common ground suggestion this week is that it's a bad

idea objectively to order mcdonald's on uber eats i agree yeah no everything gets rubbish by the time it arrives it doesn't have stopping power if you order a mcdonald's on uber eats or any other delivery service it comes and it's horrible the worst part of it it's the chips yeah because they're good for about two minutes from like scoop to just being done yeah you get them out of the the chip incubator that they have at mcdonald's and they start to die off immediately so by the time it gets there in the sort of sweaty foil bag that the the delivery drivers have it's become this horrible crusty and somehow cold mess it's like heat has somehow escaped that area but they've still dried out further yeah they're really bad and the rest of it's not much better

i will agree the chicken nuggets they they have a bit of holding power the burgers do hauled up the best i would say the best but not great yeah the thing is it'll take like 50 000 years to rot but it is good for less than 10 that's the thing it's not biodegradable but it has such a small period of time where it's edible yeah and enjoyable maybe reduce the half life of the food somehow make it fresher taste better for like a reasonable amount of time I can't really think of a fast food that's worse to order, like a takeaway that's worse to order where you're not in the restaurant.

Because McDonald's was never designed for this. Pasta, maybe? Oh, I guess. I've never ordered pasta for a delivery. No, I've never even tried it. Well, you've mentioned before, because I've sort of waxed about the idea of maybe ordering a steak from Miller & Carter

on Uber Eats before. You've shot that down regularly. not to. It's just a tremendously bad idea. It's one of those things where the convenience of it appeals so much. The idea of just being sat playing Dungeons and Dragons, a few

drinks in, getting a bit peckish and then going, you know what, I can have a steak from Miller and Carter right now but I don't know how that would hold up. It might hold up fine but for the money it costs, just wait a day or go to Miller and Carter.

yeah it's just the novelty of flicking through a delivery service and then going i can get a steak i don't have to get a pizza i don't have to get a mcdonald's you just want to feel more opulent yeah i just want that feeling of i'm not just ordering a takeaway i'm enjoying a steak yeah they actually bring some of the staff from miller and carter which is why it's so expensive i mean yeah i'll run it run it high yeah the labor costs alone i mean that's why it costs 700 pounds to order a steak from Miller & Carter and Uber Eats. I'm going to go out on a limb here. Too much.

I actually don't think they mark up the price as much, though. They do in this restaurant, though. In the restaurant, but you are paying for the experience, then. Yeah, so the markup is... It's already there. The markup's on the food and they've removed the experience. Yeah, no, you're right.

You're right. You know what? That feels good. Being able to not argue with you. Honoristic. To not argue with you. To find that common ground. How do you feel now? Was that cathartic?

Yeah, it was a nice little interlude. I feel good. I feel like I'm punching you in the face. Right, I guess that's the end of common ground. Well, that feels a little bit like some sort of organization. I feel like between the picture frames and me learning fundamental rules of the game, maybe all of them now,

it does feel like we've just smashed this out the park. i don't know that we can get better than this i mean i hope so well we'll get more experienced with it we'll get more used to it but better this is the peak don't say that that reminds me actually i was looking at a diagram of people who died on mount everest and there's a surprising amount that die right at the top yeah this is another we might agree on this all right is this common ground part two yes climbing everest isn't impressive anymore okay okay like if someone told me they climbed everest i my reaction would be like okay like it's not a great feat of mountaineering or stuff you essentially queued up somewhere and

didn't die yeah because it's not like a i was looking into it a little bit when i saw the illustration of where people have died and there's a sort of cutoff point where it's the oxygen level that really becomes by the looks of it the the death zone yeah the huge barrier yeah there's a lot that died before that yeah and there's there's a lot that there's i think there's more that died afterwards but it does make you think yeah the temperatures are obviously horrible but it does feel like now and again we are in no position to know this or any sort of comment about it to be fair but it does feel like there's some sort of like formula to it now where well have you not seen the pictures of people queuing

up to get to the actual summit. Yeah. Like, lying down the mountain. And, like, a lot of people apparently die on that, because it's like you can't move forward or backwards. Oh, so it's just a queue that you can't get out of. And then just a guy dies and you just sort of step over him and take a selfie

at the top of a mountain. Well done. Yeah, like, there must be some sort of formula to it. Like, there's still impressive mountains to climb, but it's not Everest. Well, it's because Everest, it's the tallest. yeah so everybody looks at it and goes well i want to i want to climb the tallest but there's got to be more well i say there's got to be i imagine there's more difficult ones in terms of

the terrain to navigate i think a lot of the himalayas around it is actually more difficult climbing wise because just because it's the tallest doesn't mean it's the most difficult to wander up yeah i say wander that's such a casual term for scaling it i never i never could but i think it's like 15 20 grand or something wait what what do you mean like you just pay the sherpas sorry you pay to climb everest yeah what you pay to climb it and then the sherpas who are like the native guides yeah my understanding is they basically carry all your shit and set camp up for you it's like the glamping equivalent of mountaineering sorry but will i didn't know you i imagine there'd be some sort of like fee maybe to like the like the local area where

it's almost like a sort of i don't like a like an admission ticket equivalent where you get to go to the base of everest and then you go up the trail i was thinking maybe like a couple hundred pounds just no i think so it like helps the the economy around the area because i like i mean it's a tourist attraction at heart yeah so i thought maybe you pay a bit of money that circulates around there but thousands of pounds for, I mean, yeah, like you say it's a bit like when you go to a festival and you've got the option

to pay for the extra bathrooms and stuff but that's pretty outlandish that it's thousands of pounds just to Yeah, it typically costs between £30,000 and £100,000 depending on like £100,000 to climb Everest

depending on like the level of service and guide company you use and stuff which is also the thing of like why it's not impressive it's like he's paid a hundred grand and they've taken done all of the like they've plotted the route they've carried most of your shit learning today that mount everest is paid a win yeah is one of the saddest facts i've learned all year yeah that's hard and you know what that does reinforce the idea i do agree with you that and again i don't know maybe this is a bit of a controversial thing we've decided on maybe it's just you and i united

against a lot of the world here but no i think compared to other tasks not on its own merit but compared to some other things i think i would find a lot more things impressive than somebody climbing mount everest yeah i think that's it's not really taking the shine off it knowing that you can buy it yeah it's slid down the list of like stuff that's like impressive to go out and do yeah like i would i would never do it i can't do it i just know for a fact i would i'd be one of the bodies up there but there's a lot of impressive things i can't do yeah there's a lot of things where and this is so hypocritical and just shallow but there's a lot of things where i know objectively i couldn't do them but if someone told me they could do it i'd be like i'm

not that impressed though yeah like if somebody said to me i can speak another language i can only speak english i actually find that relatively impressive but if someone can only speak one of language i would be like yeah but other people it's the access to information that we have where hearing about people who can speak like 15 languages i'm like whoa that's impressive if i meet someone which is bilingual you might as well only know one if i can meet someone and they're bilingual it's like yeah you can do that cool but there's other people who can do like 15 languages what you've done is more impressive than me but it's not impressive yeah overall yeah i'd agree with that i'm just not fascinated by it that's otherwise you would have learned all

those languages that's what it is it's the lack of fascination i'm not fascinated by it yeah i'm not fascinated i'm not interested another hot take i don't think black belts are impressive oh wow you know i guess common ground's become more of a sort of um a sort of brainstorming session where we can just get out things that we want to say hoping the other person validates our opinion yeah black belts yeah i think it's like did you have a bunch of people at your school who were black belts and they were like i know all 13 or something yeah i know of in my school there was there was definitely someone who was like a black belt and i know of someone like i know of them tangentially who i think was like a kickboxer but that was a game when they

were like 13 yeah and they're like how do you you can't that's not a real black belt and i feel like anyone i talk walking like talk to you who has like a martial arts belt got it when they were like a child well it's because a lot of people do get into it when they're younger i think yeah i don't know how long that stays a skill that you just have banked i also i don't know how it translates from like kid belt to adult yeah i'm not sure it's like a kid black belt like a blue belt in like real martial arts yeah you know let us know we're not we're not going to look into this if you know about this send us an email yeah because people aren't emailing us someone please send us an email just anything just send us a question it can be about it can be about martial

arts it can ideally be about the game what are you curious about with when it comes to the game do you want to know some of the rules well actually you can just read the rule book for that um i would say our opinion but that's what we're here to talk about um no it's actually valid that you're not getting in touch we don't have anything really to offer when it comes to questions but are the offers there info at war with a mate.co.uk fire it over if you dare yeah just anything just engage with us so we know you're not all bots we're not just screaming into the void yeah well that's that's sort of what this is for this is a game just to make sure we're doing this but today felt like the the day where so much of it was the game yeah and so little of it afterwards

has felt like filling in blank space like i actually still feel like i could talk about the game yeah like i probably should have stuck with that and talk about the game do that in future but but the the organization of it has been such a big part actually just sorting out how we're going to play the game is going to pay dividends down the line. Yeah, I think spending the time getting all that, because if we weren't keeping track of stuff properly it's like one thing's not where it's supposed to be

and it's like, oh fuck, like where is it? Yeah, I mean we did find it, to be fair, we lifted up picture frames with all the maps on today and we found a stray, I think it was the third Indian Rise of Infantry. Yes, yeah, we found one of your guys who don't come into the game until

turn 36, which is I think 20, 29 so why they were out no idea those little little devils getting out there cheeky little units sneaking around sneaking around in their motorized vehicles what are they like the third motorized indian battalion or division yeah yeah whoever they are we won't see them for for a while i i was thinking actually today when we were getting everything sorted just that looming cloud of the germans they're incoming i mean a long way off but one day yeah one day we've got the germans to worry about that's a whole other thing that's years in the

future literal years in the future if this is base camp then that's the death zone oh that's it that's it and if we finish this game it'll be more impressive than climbing everest because less people will have done it less people will have done it less people, I will confidently say this right now, will have died I mean objectively yeah

but less people will ever finish fewer people will ever finish this game than will climb Everest probably this year ever? no like in the entire history of this game less people will complete it than will climb Everest this year

yes, no, agreed so yeah well much more impressive someone's gonna be like i climbed everest i'm like well let me hit a campaign for north africa the unbeatable game that's what they keep the hidden mountain yes that's what this is you might be traversing the arid snowy wastelands of everest but we are traversing the deserts of our mind there we go you knew it was coming you knew it was coming oh this is it solid progress we are moving with steady momentum we are juggernauts of industry and media and entertainment we are subtle humble and brave nothing's gonna stop this train become sophisticated war gamers we are the

sophisticated war gamer we are the thinking man's podcaster we're going for it i think that's it That's all we've got to say today because all we've got to do now is get some rest for next week because we are going full steam ahead, baby. Climb the mountain. Climb the mountain and fuck the trucks. Good night. Stay subtle, humble, and brave.