War With A Mate - Episode 48: The Spooktacular

Episode Date: October 31, 2025

Get your butcher knives, demon summoning puzzles and scary masks to hand - the guys are getting spooky! A terrifyingly important series of moves take place in the final movement phase of Turn Two, and a new history segment sews existential dread at the concept of what could be history repeating itself. A Common Ground segment and musings throughout this week’s episode really touch on the scariest of topics, so lock those doors!

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Because we have your number. He did the mash. He did the monster mash. The monster mash. What was it, Andy? The monster mash. It was a graveyard smash. welcome to the wolvermate spooktacular halloween episode

are we allowed to do the monster voices then i did ask no no but the soundboard that we've got the mixer it does have a monster voice button i know i just don't want you to come ahead at this and then nursing we have to record again yeah thankfully we've not got to that point yet but this could be the day andy i can see just leave the button we've got we've got the options of male female robot monster baby and elder i like that they grouped up like the the gender ones together and then you've got the age ones and in the middle of both of those you've got robot and monster it's an interesting categorization that they've got and that they it makes the the baby and elder feel like afterthoughts well it's the always silly joke about when

someone gets old enough they stop being a man or a woman and they're just an old person that's a good point you're either a baby a person with their own identity or an old person or maybe a robot or a monster somewhere along the way are we not all robots or monsters andy we either abide by the rules that society has put out to us or we push back against that we become truly unique and the world sees us as monsters well they always say there's two wolves inside everyone and one of them's a robot and one of them's a monster this is war with a mate it's the podcast in which we swear to god we talk about the campaign for north africa occasionally we'll mention other fun things like age so we've uh yeah upstage

free turn two almost done the only thing left is the truck convoy pesky trucks truck day i hate truck day but and it's happening more and more often it is it felt like it was just yesterday that we did truck day we're now in a cycle i've realized of we have truck day air day and then movement yeah we've got an upstage down to three sessions it's fast it's good that's genuinely good work we should give ourselves a pat on the back there's nothing spooky about today no get rid of the spooktacular stuff it's not even that scary although today some scary things did happen yeah this was a a hell of a movement stage i think for both of us very minimal big scale combat some some fun skirmishes some decisive combat so i guess

we'll start i went first so let's go from that other than one little cluster uh i basically pulled everyone back so city briani where i had the fourth um which was about an upstage away from getting into combat with you just distance wise yeah i've decided to pull them back back towards my stuff uh closer to mersima true to try and take advantage of some terrain because the place i was trying to hold was sort of five or six hexes wide yeah and i had two divisions so i've pulled back to a place where it's two hexes between the coast and the like, escarpments

and the sort of rough terrain you don't want to be moving stuff through. So I'm going to hold there just as you've got your rumbling wall of stuff moving forwards. It was, yeah. It was there for a little while, that one upstage and I knew it would put the fear of God

into you, and I'm glad I did it. Because now you have moved further east. Yes. So that was a good payoff. You moved them east, but you moved someone further west, didn't you, Andy? Well, I guess I'll... I moved the 2nd New Zealand who were going to the front

back to Mesa Matru. And the 7th pulled back to the supply depot they've been nearby. Which I found out last offstage full of supplies, that thing. Oh, yeah. That supply dump is

rife. It is just absolutely jam-packed full of goodies. Although it's getting drained soon. no well i guess yes it is but by me yeah your seventh can't carry all that stuff no but luckily because it's the upstage free i'm gonna do all the store expenditure out of the supply dump no so their trucks can all be full did not think about that i would have liked to be there for this nice little timing thing yeah no i can see that now i'm gonna have to go back over the numbers on those supply dumps and see how much there was store-wise because i did quite

like that for me i think it was in the hundreds yeah it was it was definitely in the hundreds yeah at hundreds is sort of what i need ah well they're getting eaten up for fuck's sake i needed that so the seven pulled back a bit and then yes what you're alluding to uh my guys who are behind enemy lines they really went for it this turn some spooky ghouls yes so they were being attacked by like five units of guns so they pulled out of that looped around behind them and attacked the fort they'd come from uh not fort the town they'd come from yes where there were more guns waiting for them yes uh won a fight there um won a fight uh i don't know about that you retreated so yes you lost some men uh yeah but won the fight you know how many did you lose again 10 10 yeah which

when you have like six toe points is significant yeah i lost five percent i think but i was forced to retreat yes so they pushed further away they moved up to a crossroad nearby which cleared the way for the king's royal rifle company to do a a suicide mission um yes they went miles behind enemy lines pushed themselves to minus 24 out of 26 coherence yes they got to one of your airfields they did matuba yeah they they did they got to one of my airfields which held a diverse series of squadrons there were some fighters there were some bombers and all of them are now defunct because you went in and you butchered all of those sgsus i had horrifying flashbacks of fort madalena it's like in the film halloween where you get the flashback to michael myers

killing his sister i'll have to take your word for it yeah it's it's just like that michael myers finds his sister at the Mortuba airfield and kills her and the rest of the SGSUs in cold blood. And then he comes back to Hadfield years later and tries to do the same thing again.

Kills more SGSUs. But when he gets back there, he finds that no one other than Rommel is there and he kills them. Nice to kill Rommel on a vacation. No, Rommel wins. He's sort of the Dr. Loomis. Rommel's more

he's a shifty escape guy he's not maybe he's the shape maybe he's Michael Myers that'd be weird that'd be a weird piece of lore I could see Rommel being a bit of a Michael Myers type character really?

yeah on the game map yeah he just sort of appears doodling he does yeah okay just trust me on that you've not seen the films

yeah I don't know enough of Halloween to argue with you but I'm pretty sure you're wrong nah that's law accurate it's in the third one i think so yeah you you did do that you butchered my sgs and i was not pleased about that not one shot so at the end of my movement i had one thing on map c which is the seventh most of my stuff is on map d i did have two things on map b so I was I had more of a presence

on my side of map C than you did on actual map C which is the middle point it's meant to be the middle ground it's meant to be the common ground it's the centre of the game it's the front and you have one group there and it's the 7th

and they suffered breakdowns as well 33% of their tanks broke down yes and then 10% they lost I think 5 or 6 tanks overall um that's not nothing it's a lot actually yeah so they are they are not doing well yes they may have supplies but those tanks will never see a repair yard oh no well i still also haven't done my repairs however if i get to them they will see a repair yard they will make their way to

to brook where they will be fixed by maybe end of turn four so that's what i'll be doing i'll be taking those tanks because the truck bandits have wreaked havoc on me for far too long and today i sought vengeance yes so that was the end of my movement and then you got in there i took decisive action is what i did first and foremost i moved forces to tackle this problem i moved the libyan tank command which is sort of a shell unit at the moment it's the it's the divisional headquarters with some tanks to help garrison it, and I sent them on the warpath to try

and take on... The Royal Northumberland Fusiliers. Uh, yes. And, no, it was the other ones. No, the ones who got wiped out were the King's Royal. The number of Fumberland Fusiliers were the ones... Yes. So, um,

yes, they tackled the RNF, and in that battle, there was a bit of a, you know, exchange of blows i lost nothing i believe in that one yeah and i lost 10 which is just a toe point for what they have yes so a bit of a skirmish quite some blows big toe point yeah an important one a vital one for your survival well i'm just gonna say it because uh they have free toe now or then at max right okay and they don't have that anymore no because i sent them off forward uh not taking into account they are my elite infantry i see and you've done this with

them you turn them into what you turn them into what the long range desert group should be and have failed to become yeah this is a sort of flash forward to what the sas were doing so they they stuck around they got into that fight meanwhile your guys who went really balls to the wall they ended up being attacked by the Derner garrison who marched their way further down south and they were bigger than I realised

they had quite a bit more might to them than I expected, we're talking you know, double digit two points, which is good, which meant that when that fight came about, because of their ridiculously bad cohesion level they surrendered on contact with enemy

so the Derner garrison took them all those truck bandits half of the truck bandits are officially gone i've got them they're over it's done the reign of terror is over they had two toe points left so you just captured 200 guys who i picture being fairly smug evil dies tonight that's what they say in one of the halloween films so that's that's what i did i i struck back i i reclaimed the the trucks that remain in their possession they are now mine they're back back in my rightful ownership have you looked at what you got no i bet it's nothing i bet it's it's absolute pittance i bet it's complete crap at this point it's just trucks full of sand and the bodies of sgs use uh because they

went so far there's a lot of broken down truck i've got no doubt that a lot of them are broken down but it's not about the trucks i got back it's about the trucks i stopped you having that's fine yeah it's like a spite thing i mean you can have sort of seven trucks for your entire air force seven trucks that's like twice the size of my usual convoys i did not manage my convoys well that's a big load of supplies coming to the front yeah well you talk a big talk but i have a million trucks coming from tripoli next next turn i believe it's the it's the first or second upstage of turn three i've got like a bazillion trucks are they um because they also arrive with the black shirts are those trucks

full of supplies or have you left some empty so they can have guys uh some of them are empty just because of my poor planning at the start of the game and not knowing how it works oh okay so yes you left them empty so you can mechanize sorry are you trying to give me an attaboy here yeah Why? Because I've realized if I big you up, then when I beat you, it makes me look more impressive. Oh, I see. I thought this was a way to try it. Or I lose and it looks less bad because I've

bigged you up. So you want to take a sort of moral high ground, or you want to boost your own ego? Yes. To both. What's your favorite scary movie? Scary movie? That's not a scary movie, though, is it? It's a parody. I've not watched a lot of scary movies.

Probably Scream. Yeah. It's definitely mine. Scream's definitely mine. I'm a big fan of the Scream franchise. Yeah, we watched all of them. Last year? Yeah, for our Halloween movie season. Yeah, we try to do that each year. We're aiming to do Halloween this year,

but we're running out of time really to watch them. We'll watch them after Halloween at this point. To be fair, last year we watched most of the Scream things in November. That's a good point. Yeah, we did. The new one's coming out soon. Yeah. It comes out February.

Excited for it. We'll have to go see that. I love those films. Very good films. I've went as Ghostface for Halloween parties a few times because it's just a very easy costume it's very easy to

move around in, not like when I dressed as the cat in the hat or the Mandalorian yeah, the Mandalorian was a very cool costume I really liked doing that one I had the cool helmet the metal helmet, I got an outfit like the actual suit was less

spectacular, that was a sort of cheap plastic and the zipper broke and it came with a baby grogu and do you want to tell the fans what you did with your ward that you were protecting so it didn't come with it i bought him separately and it was to attend a this one was actually not a halloween night this was a disney themed night at a club and i went to this event with a baby yoda grogu slung around me the way the mandalorian does uh because they go together because he loves him so much you bastard uh yeah so i went to this event and when i was there uh you know drinks are flowing it's a it's a nightclub all's you know party

atmosphere so i may have at one point when somewhat socially lubricated traded grogu baby yoda the child um for four tabs um that's cigarette yeah i i i traded them for uh less than a quarter of a pack of cigarettes yeah you have to be careful saying tabs because we that's a good point that yeah people yes not tabs of acid or any other sort of tab uh cigarettes i traded grogu for four cigarettes no i i uh yeah i i definitely wouldn't be doing um any form of hallucinogenic drug in a nightclub i'm fine with my my cigarettes and alcohol i believe it was the beatles that sung that one so they sort of went back with it by getting really into psychedelics yeah yeah they if anything they were actually very very strong

in the psychedelics but not me no i got rid of baby yoda but i i think we went on a bit of a tangent there a bit yeah i was trying to keep with the halloween theme instead we've determined that i will happily trade uh any form of alien for a few cigarettes at a nightclub if the time calls for it yeah just like captain kirk it's the prime directive yeah so uh back to the game itself the the real uh question time now is not um what i did was morally gray or not it's what happens now because i moved my guys very far east after that yeah well we saw i moved a wall yeah we've dealt with the my attack behind your lines you attacked both of them and then your actual divisions they moved east every single division that is not currently stationed in a settlement as in a major

city they moved east they moved east hard as well you also sort of found out around the seventh i'm sure you'll put the picture on the instagram but they are they are surrounded i think i'm going to use that as the the picture for this week because the seventh are now um they're stuck they are in the middle of nowhere at a supply dump they have no allies anywhere near that aren't cut off by one of my divisions and i have five divisions that are all horseshoed around them and there's there's no way out of there uh they can retreat and have like a sort of nightmare yeah retreat through the desert but yeah they're sort of well they're not sort of they're very isolated from supplies this supply dump will keep them going through a turn at least in terms of movement for

fuel and water evaporation all that stuff but they have to use that turn to get back to my uh supply lines yeah it's it's going to be a difficult one for them to get out of because if they want to try and push uh any further into my lines they're going to have to retreat for a while first and group back up with some of the units. They can't fight in their current state. They've got one or two fights in them, I'd say, but

with five divisions around them, that's not one or two fights, that's five fights every offstage. I think what it is, it's two divisions fight them in their weakened state and the rest of them just march past. That'll be interesting to see how that plays out, because they do have a secret weapon

I haven't used yet. What possible secret weapon? Secret? What secret weapon do they have? Is it hunting Webberts? It's the 11 facades who haven't been involved in combat yet and have some nasty tricks up their sleeve. I mean, the nasty tricks can only be boiled down to the mechanics of the game, which is being able to attack or defend.

And move, I guess, yes. If you do another truck bandit thing, I'm not going to be happy, Andy. Don't you? If you do another truck bandit thing... I have prepared for that, though. I'm going to give you a little sense of these guys. Okay, let's hear it. They have the same movement as the Long Range Desert Group.

Right. As a combat unit. Okay. And I believe they have five and six for close assault and defense. Right, so they are actually very scary. Yes. Okay, noted. Don't like the sound of that at all.

um i'll i'll bear that in mind because that's that's unnerving i've got some black shirts that are quite scary but not yeah they're not huge in numbers how many two points are we talking roughly uh they have six two points right okay out of a maximum eight because they start low uh sorry i overdid it uh two and three but that's still quite that's a that's a force to be reckoned with with the cpa yeah um i can tackle that that's fine i've got enough divisions i'll blow them up because i'm sort of weighing up re-splintering the seventh we want to have them back to the seventh and friends yeah because all the thing i've said you could lock them down with two divisions and march past them but if there's like five or six

things there they are all a threat it might change the way that happens possibly because together they're an incredibly dangerous division but what you do lose i'd say division to division they beat any of your divisions probably maybe one on one i've not looked at the game stats but historically for sure oh yeah historically i think there's definitely precedent for it you've got the desert rats combined with a group that are by the sounds of it very very capable with close assault but i i do have a secret weapon of my own oh you've seen them though they are snaking their way along map d yes now this is the big bit for your movement this is really a concern for me is that is it the sahara detachment it is the saharan detachment have continued uh their expedition

further east and they've made it deeper into map d um breakdown to be determined i haven't rolled my breakdown at the end of today's session so i need to figure that out however they've made it further along they're now halfway they're pretty much smack bang in the middle of map d yeah um they're about halfway across and they're halfway down and they're continuing along a trail to move further east which will soon take them onto map e if i so choose yes or you can sort of burn some coherence and strike up or anywhere on the north sort of coast road uh which is making a lot of stuff vulnerable for me so they're sort of doing the job my truck bandits were doing but with the sort of weight to carry it

or like they can fight divisions probably? They have actual combat readiness. A division, I think, might be a little bit out of their realistic capability. I think they've got some good strength to them. I'm just having a little look at them now. And I mean, their two points are, I mean, they're pretty formidable.

They've got some nasty stuff when it comes to close assault and close defense. defense especially we're looking at scores of seven um and it's it's not a single toe point defense is seven yes uh and their assault um is it's it's comparable and again it's not a single toe point for some of these so yeah you're looking at some some real capability and if they get into a fight with someone again probably not a division i think that that's probably beyond their pay grade yeah but they can take on another group of their size and they have the combat capability to really do some damage yeah so i'm interested to see how that pans out i've got i'm torn between two ideas

which i'm not going to get into really um as to what i'm going to do with them but both of them of course negative for you uh i assumed it'd be weird if we're doing the other way around i think initiative for turn three is going to be a huge decider it is because that will determine whether or not your seventh can zip on out of there before i attack them and it will also determine whether or not you can do whatever you're going to do along that northern road without my intervention yeah because i have guys that are on the cusp of being on that road and one of them is a tank battalion uh not tank battalion tank division for the most part yeah so i've got a lot of tanks i can just start sweeping along that north road it's just a case

of who's going to back them up yeah that's that's the real because you need to combine arms and yeah i need to have a look at what um room i have in some of those groups for extra infantry to join up yeah because i can split off in theory some of the scarier parts of the black shirts and stick them in with some tanks yeah and that makes for a nightmare for people like you it's a bit of a taken thing trying to drop in some horror references but i went with taken there which isn't really horror it it talks about the horror if you're his daughter well yeah if you're his daughter or i guess if you uh or what are the albanian gangsters i think yeah i'm pretty sure they're albanian in that film um uh they're in france i think the people he encounters at

first are albanian and his daughter loves you too which is probably the most unrealistic part of that film remember when you two made you download the album on apple yeah that was itunes maybe one of the worst moves in music history just to make people resent one underhanded move by both youtube and apple yeah apple i would expect it of you know they're they're you know big they're big business they're they're big tech whereas but they're the big apple if anything new york fantastic new york impression there well the idea of being like everyone gets to the album for free is like fine if they get a choice whether to download it or not yeah one day you just woke up with it and i ended up listening to the song volcano like 14 times

when i used to walk from work uh back to my place because for some reason when my phone went offline if i ran out of data it would only have that saved so i would just listen to that one song the rest of the album wouldn't be maintained on my phone but that one song would so yeah in the end i kind of like the song i haven't listened to it in about 10 years now and that's probably for the best speaking of phones the pictures might be better quality because you've got a new phone so hopefully the instagram will be a bit i do and you know what i i've got a a bone to pick with people this this could well have been a common ground i have been getting stick all day because i got a phone case for my new phone my old phone by the way it was dying constantly it was a an

iphone 8 i think and i've had it since like covid so the thing was old it was dying inside of an hour if i wasn't charging it like constantly it was on life support i had a power bank at all times in my pocket ready to keep it charged i've got another phone now it's another old iphone so it's still you know years behind the models that are out now but i got post covid it's post covid and i got a i got a flip phone case it's one of the like the leather bound flip phone cases cards and stuff you can put your cards in like your debit card your id your tesco club card and i keep on getting ridiculed for this i don't know why people are like oh you've got a you've got this you know dad phone case it is a dad phone case though well i mean i suppose so but i i just i i like it i

think it's cool i'm sure you do i i like it i think it's i think it's really good it's going to protect my phone it makes it look kind of cool and slick and yeah see that's the fucking problem andy i keep on saying it i get that reaction people act like i've done something wrong here no they're just not letting you compliment yourself i should be able to compliment myself i well if you know what andy if i can't have people saying nice things about me hopefully we can find people saying interesting things about the podcast how about that yeah let's let's escape from reality into the email let's dip into the mail bag and i'm gonna bring up the mail on my phone how about that there we go look at that i've got i've got my cards in there

i think that's cool and it's got a magnetic thing there so it clips shut when i wanted to so that's good and also there's a little uh thing here where i can put um money in if i had any money all my money's digital i don't need any any uh paper money anymore um but what i do need is to read out this email from jake and the email reads hello andy and james i am jake writing from new york new york just made a reference new york that is possibly the best new york impression you'll ever hear the big apple um i'm really sorry uh and have been a listener as of only a few weeks ago and have been tearing through your episodes whilst at work at the time of writing i'm on episode 38 hoping to hear this read out when i catch up well here

you go jake here's your moment you guys are great and i love as an american hearing the cool things you brits have and say and how you say them uh well judging by the fact i've just tried to do a new york impression several times and failed horribly jake maybe you'll be taking that back hard to say i googled what a huel is after hearing so much about it and wish i never had to be honest every time huel was said i could only picture huel from better call soul and i know you get the reference based on previously mentioned chicanery yes i absolutely do uh very good program love it um instead of fuel from the show i now see a 35 gram protein plant-based drink which is not as funny well the 35 gram protein one uh is actually the black edition it's the

black edition uh the normal one i think is only 20 grams of protein um and it's the normal one is the one they include in meal deals at sainsbury's not the black edition i wish he hadn't ruined that for himself because i love the idea of just picturing yule from breaking bad and beckles he thinks that way we're sat here drinking yule babino from the breaking bad universe on the topic of pronunciation in one of your early episodes you pronounced uh i guess this is part of the problem isn't it um juice as juice which is d-u-c-e uh pronounced it as juice d-e-u-c-e which unless you are the baby from family guy is incorrect it is correctly pronounced duche and i believe you owe big muss an apology game related i had a question about

cavalry is there mention of it at all it was outdated after the war became mechanized but as every bit of help was needed they were used for supply and reconnaissance and in the german army about 80 percent of their transport was equestrian and by the end of the war the army had about 500 percent more horses than at the start that's impressive and odd um and by means we can only assume were nazi horse orgies to keep up with the demand uh and that explains the odd uh there is one cavalry unit i believe but it's not a it's a camel cavalry unit yes there are a few that are cavalry in name yes i don't think they actually have horses basically a lot of historic cavalry regiments became tank regiments because they sort of one became obsolete at the same time the other

sort of appeared yes so there are uh cavalry units i'm not sure i mean i can't speak to the history it's very much your wheelhouse andy um can't speak to how many horses were in the north african campaign specifically but there was definitely camels i haven't looked it up but uh Yeah. It seems like a bad idea. Yeah, I can't imagine horses would have a great time out there. I mean, the camels, we don't really understand them in the context of the game anyway.

Also, I guess kind of importantly, everything that's happening in this war is being shipped from Europe. And if you have a limited number of supply ships, why would you fill one with horses? Why would you fill planes with dead camels, Andy? The game tells you to do that as well. We still don't have an answer for that. so I guess don't put horses in ships

don't put dead camels in planes don't put dead camels anywhere just leave them where they are they live and die in the desert I don't think you should be moving them ok leave them there um in a

game of logistics I figured there would be some mention I am a fan of grand strategy and wargaming mostly spent on hearts of iron 4 I highly recommend it it's a computer role playing computer game role playing any country during world war ii that is very supply number and percentage based lastly i think you guys would get some answers for your camels so there we go if you just got on top of

them attached is an image of italian camelry as it was really called uh in the 1930s occupation of somaliland somaliland somaliland somaliland i couldn't find much of a presence in the north african campaign of this camelry but if y'alls dig up something that might make a good history bit anyways i apologize for the length please continue the good work and stay subtle humble and brave i like the little um abbreviation there the initialism sshab ooh sashab getting out we're busy oh yeah yeah we're busy people we can't say the full thing um i will be here for the long run jake and you know what jake i'm adding it to my list we will have a history of camels in north africa at one point well i think it's the finale of the whole thing isn't it when we finally figure

out the camels that's where this whole thing ends it's not when we finish the game it's when we figure out the camels because that will take years longer than the actual gameplay oh the gameplay will take decades anyway um jake did actually follow up with a few other cool bits um he sent over um a video that mentions the 28th maori uh yes you should look that up it's the video is called italian world war ii veterans talk about 28th maori battalion soldiers it's sort of a very real glimpse of the impact yeah you see the fear in this man's eyes yeah uh and there's mention in it of the uh the maori problem as if it's was a significant thing that everyone was thinking about yeah some like big nebulous threat to existence um they also talk

about the bayonet charge where they would get charged and stabbed with these bayonets and then shot point blank afterwards with the bayonet still in them yeah which is just a terrifying thing to one be stabbed and then be blown apart afterwards napoleon blown apart if anything hey that's uh that's another war reference i've moved away from halloween i've went deep into history um and jake's also mentioned uh a book recommendation which is uh mussolini's war by john gooch uh and he he's uh he's parenthesized haha after the surname gooch very uh sophomoric humor there um jake but i i love it um i i can't deny i'm really a big fan of stuff like that so that that warms my heart um but thank you for the email there jake very

detailed and really makes me reflect on how much we used to talk about Huel. We don't talk about Huel enough these days, Andy. You noticed that? We went back last week. We did, but I feel like even then maybe this is the Huel renaissance. No. Wouldn't that be spooky? Would that scare you? Huel

returning from the grave. Yeah, I think that would scare you, so well, Jake, thank you very much. On to the next, which is from Monty. It is. Hi, James and Andy. My name is Monty. started to listen to your podcast nearly a month ago and i'm up to episode 38 at the time of writing this dedication i'm an amazon delivery driver in the us of a and i have lots of time

to just listen to things while i drive i've heard you all mentioned you do cfna on weekdays after work and was what wondering what sort of professions both of you do obviously if it's too personal you can ignore this but i was curious what occupies the rest of your time when not playing dnd or campaign for north africa won't get too specific but uh software development uh writing code yeah um i'm an astronaut yeah they'll believe that yeah no probably not i no i i i've i've done quite a few things i've worked in um i've worked in sales i've worked in finance i've done a i've done a whole a whole bunch of things all over the place quite the sporadic mix no astronaut stuff yet and now i work in um i work in health care i work in

mental health services which uh yeah it's it's a bit of a far cry from um my pastime but that's uh that's the job that's that's what that's what the day-to-day looks like james also mentioned the crummy weather in the uk overcast with threats of rain happened to be on a boat today however i enjoy clouds and rain a lot maybe i should move to the uk if you like clouds and rain come on over um we got plenty to go around uh i like a good boat as well you're a boat fan i don't mind a boat i've been on a ferry a few times um i've got the ferry from dover to france same that's a good one done the amsterdam uh newcastle one haven't done that one haven't done that one i just slept for like 16 hours ah that's a yeah i bet that was a good one then it's coming back from a fun

little trip i've been in it for the long haul so if you're still doing this uh for the next 50 60 years i'll be right there with you uh so you're not allowed to quit uh stay subtle humble and brave and don't uh make sure you don't get lost in the deserts of your mind cheers monty monty you got both the catchphrases in there that's good that's that's a tough one to get in i didn't think one person could do it that's why me and andy distribute it evenly but very nicely done and when it comes to uh the long haul yeah we're in this too i mean we're coming up to a year now it's we're sort of committed we can't really back out now yeah we've got too many of you interested and money has followed up yeah hi y'all uh i don't mean to bombard you with emails on the same day but

i am partway through episode 41 and you got an email about asking about doing a live show and you all talked about uh how it's a fun idea but you have no idea how you do it well i propose that instead of a live show uh you should just have a live stream going while you play so people can pop in and see what you're up to easy setup just turn on the camera and start your screen stream just a full feel free to either read or not i decided to read stay subtle humble and brave you guys money yeah good idea money um we've been talking about this a bit uh there's some logistical challenges but we do want to we do want to be able to stream to you guys we just need sort of cameras and equipment and figure out figure out the geometry of this room yeah because when

it comes to something live i think it'll be a lot of fun um whether it's a live in-person thing or whether it's a live stream both of them have logistical challenges uh the most part of that is is trying to figure out how we keep this as something that's going to be engaging during that because i think we've talked about it a lot but i think when you actually see what a play session of this looks like a lot of it is us pondering decisions over the board filling out spreadsheets and just repeating that until the turn sort of comes to an end it would be good to give people a sense of what a play session looks like it'll be a very different play session it'll be a very um yeah a very theatrical one we'd have to really find a way to work around that um fluff it up a

bit it's something we we've talked about quite a few times now and we are looking at how to do that we in short we have plans for it we just need to figure out how to do that we need we need to get the equipment for it because we do not have the equipment to do that we don't have a way to record that reliably um and and you know a good quality recording of it so we're looking at all the ways we can put something like that together um as for the live show um yeah it's a fun pipe dream yes well we'll get the war a bit live maybe no one will come but we'll do one at some point we'll do one somewhere we just need to figure out where that'll be i think chicago at this point it's looking like because wow a lot of chicagans chicago also like doing field trips so yeah so

they'd happily come along yeah so chicago if you want us there you just let us know that's where we'll go as for the live stream it'll be right here i would imagine where we're doing this recording and we yeah we need to we'll figure it out we've got plans for it monday we we want to diversify how we do this we think it'll be a lot of fun we just need to figure that out because we've got the grips with the game now we just need to figure out everything else we're doing yes we're we're not a year in we got to mix this up we've got recording down pretty much although we've had some nightmares yeah we say that and we've had some real challenges but that's part of the fun we never claim to be experts at this we're just the ones doing it well some fantastic

mail thank you jake thank you monday and everyone else who sent some stuff in we've got some great emails still in the pipeline there some that will be their own uh individual dedicated mailbag session for them because they are lengthy but if anyone wants to send something in you can do at info at war with a mate.co.uk uh there is the instagram which is just war with a mate and the web form on the website does work I've tested it again and we did get one through the form's working again warwithamate.co.uk is the website

that's where you can send that, we've got some bits and pieces on there in terms of pictures as well we'll read it all out if you send an email we will get to it we are we're doing this for 20 odd years we will get to it and you made a vow in episode 9

way to commit us we're men of our word love hearing from great stuff it is it's great hearing from you folk now we've unfortunately got to delve into something else which is uh well the past indeed so what are we delving into in the past because we left the seventh armor division sort of in the middle of nowhere a bit like you did in the game indeed well sort of dig we ran up to the 13th of september and the start of graziani's offensive the 13th of september uh yeah it wasn't a friday was it uh it actually was yeah oh spooky there we

go see it's all halloween theme i actually did look that up last week an ill-fated start so instead of continuing with the seventh we'll pick them up next week i thought it would be a good chance to jump in and sort of what we what each side had at the beginning of this okay a bit of a Holistic breakdown. Yes. But we are starting with two quotes this time. Oh, double whammy. Never has a military operation been undertaken so much against the will of the commanders.

That's a quote from Mussolini's son-in-law about this. And it is not the number of men which causes me anxiety, but their weapons, equipped with limited and very old pieces of artillery almost lacking anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons it is useless to send more thousands of men if we cannot supply them the indispensable requirements to move and fight and that's a quote from Balbo

ah he's rearing his head again is he he is he's popping up again from all the way back in Chicago yeah so on the 13th of September 1940 the italians march with six infantry divisions accompanied by a battalion of 200 tanks a force of a quarter million men and arms supported by 400 guns and roughly 190 fighter planes that's what i'm looking at standing against them 30 000 british soldiers with half the tanks and only 48

fighter planes yep that sounds familiar we've seen this oh yes but if we take a step behind the numbers uh we get a very different picture which explains graziani's reluctance to push forward okay so we'll start off with the officers the uh we'll start with italy um warning this did just turn into a sort of roast of italy's army but uh so yeah the italian officers are described as being arrogant and dismissive of their own men the army on the whole is badly trained italy's troops had done fairly well in spain against the republicans and in ethiopia but morale was mixed to say the least also their divisions were undermined uh undermanned because of previous conflicts so what they did was they reduced the definition of a division from three

regiments to two so that they could have the same amount of divisions on paper that's so that's not that doesn't make it better that's just that's shuffling around yeah it looks better on the books that's not making you more formidable in well there's a lot of this in the italian preparation of a sort of if we look like we can win a war we'll win a war regardless of the reality sorry so graziani was going with the fake it till you make it mentality to win a war no graziani was going with the i don't want to do this i shouldn't do this stop telling me to do this i can't win ah well you know guy knew what was right uh yeah so just to go in on your black shirts for instance they were well equipped to a certain extent they had uh fancy uniforms they

looked good but they also um ignored the realities of war in favor of like romanticized heroic narratives it made them tactically inflexible for example they also favored bayonet charges a move enjoyed by the 28th maori but they kept doing them at the wrong times because they're oh dear that's a very tragic visual a german field marshal described the italian troops as such after the war they seem to have a garrison mentality and in fact much of their training was done in garrison a totally inappropriate practice for exposing troops to the hardships of the battlefield their training remained superficial without reaching a satisfactory level so yeah um just not well trained and not trained for the environment they're fighting in

which is a massive negative yeah it's a desert you kind of need to be ready for the environment or it will kill you yeah he also points out there's a lack of contact between officers and the men for instance officers are enjoying like lavish rations while men are often starving or on minimal rations which is just tremendously bad for morale which explains a little bit about why all of my units have such terrible morale when the game starts yeah the issues they have are further compounded by bad equipment for example their armored cars are from 1909 so pre-world war like last week i was going the seventh had old equipment it was from world war one they're pre-world war that's so bad i mean we've we've talked about the the bad italian tanks quite

a few times yeah the l3 tankettes um which i you should look these up because you can see pictures of people standing next to these tanks and they look like sort of dodging cars like they'd fit one or two people the people would have to lie down in them what a terrifyingly claustrophobic situation it's such a bad piece of equipment they for they had 12 millimeter thick armor uh compared to the 80 millimeter thick armor of british matilda two tanks 80 like 80 yeah wow yeah so 12 vastly different yeah this is this is partially a strategic issue from before the war where the italians massively underestimated the role tanks were going to play in warfare it's one of those weird things where you look back at it now and from my perspective it's

like how did you underestimate how important tanks would be but yeah yeah it's easy to look at things in hindsight but that just seems like such a fundamentally bad thing yeah i think hindsight gives us a lot but also a bit of foresight would have helped them as well because pretty much every other nation got ready for this they did have another tank the m11 this had a rotating machine gun on top but the tank gun itself the main cannon uh was limited to pointing the direction the tank was pointing yes we've mentioned this before yeah which it's like uh it's um michael keaton's batman yes he can only rotate and look in a different direction if his whole body moves and that's not great for a tank especially in the desert yeah it sort of defeats

the point it's just a gun on a car yeah much more so than a normal tank yeah if you can't orient it in a particular direction it's so difficult to maneuver uh speaking of the other guns they're short on anti-tank guns and they're short on aircraft guns they have world war one era artillery or older which is also lacking ammo and very importantly they don't have enough radio sets to coordinate across the desert and the radio sets they do have can't be used in a vehicle they have to stop set them up send the messages and then load them back onto vehicles which makes coordinating across a vast space like a desert unreasonably difficult that explains why i keep making bad decisions yeah there's richard big really captured that and applied it to you

specifically it's it's art imitating life imitating art an example of just like their guns just being badly designed they have a 47 millimeter anti-tank gun but it doesn't have you know typically guns of this if you see them they have the metal sheet at the front yeah like a sort of a guard yeah they're called splinter sheets these guns didn't have them so there's multiple reports of explosions going off in front of the guns and then british troops wandering in and capturing an intact gun with the entire crew around it being dead. Oh, wow.

So they're getting killed by their own weapons going off. Yes, all firing back and just not having the protection. Oh, I see. So yeah, when they're getting shot back out, they're just getting torn apart. Yeah. And the guns have survived that blast because they're much more durable than flesh.

Yes. Which brings us to the air. Graziani had 84 modern bombers and 114 fighters with a fervor of 113 aircraft which would be considered obsolete it did have the fiat 42 fire yes i've got them yeah yeah which was highly maneuverable for planes of the time um still outmatched by british hurricanes though so just yeah in total they had 363 aircraft in north africa of at the start of the war of which 306 were operational operational uh and 57 were training planes and then they had a favor 179 planes that were unserviceable and unusable but

were taking up resources we should have a look at that actually um before next play session and see how that compares to the starting planes that we all get yeah well i've been wanting to do a comparison with this sort of stuff and what we get in the game but i don't want to look too closely at your stuff so i'm gonna space that out yeah yeah we do need to do that at some point though to see how how fun um you know richard berger's uh had keeping to fact or fiction with this yeah how much of it is balanced for the mechanics of a game or you know has he just went completely law accurate yes and it's just functionally the same war i imagine it's the latter based on everything i know oh yeah this military effort's further been hampered by mussolini over the next

the last decade who's been selling off their newly created aircraft and weapons that would have been a match for british stuff to countries sort like spain and turkey and he's been buying surplus equipment from the collapse of the austro-hungarian empire to equip his own troops with so he could have had better stuff he was selling it yes while in his head preparing for this glorious war which is just like disconnected from reality like another example of it they don't have enough trucks for their army so they're borrowing trucks from private businesses so they can hold lavish parades to show the populace how powerful their military is i i actually don't understand the logistical decision there because i understand wanting to try and like boost morale but

it that will eventually fail you yeah like you're gonna have all the parades you want but if you then lose yeah it was for nothing i don't actually understand why and these parades would have been expensive to put on most likely but this is the thing it's like aesthetics this like being functional because mussolini's got all these grand ambitions to rebuild the roman empire and stuff but he seems to have no concept of what actually goes into fighting a war which makes sense on a certain level because he was a journalist who sort of wormed his way up uh and just didn't listen to his advisors another example of a Mussolini fuck up is when it comes to your navy and your supply situation uh Italy wasn't ready for Mussolini's declaration of war because he puts

this out on radio rome which is like his mouthpiece and also um yeah how he puts all this stuff out he puts out on that um which is being listened to by british intelligence and other things so he announces this offensive before the offensive happens so the british are like oh cool we're about to be attacked this just it seems like sabotage of his own efforts here yeah i mean even further he didn't warn his merchant fleet so a third of his merchant fleet is in british ports when he declares war on britain so those ships are just immediately captured and not let out and used by the brit like he loses a third of his feet fleet merchant fleet like for supplies and logistics the moment he declares war

so he would have known that though like why i i need to i we will be having a mussolini episode i think a lot of it will be my quest to understand these decisions was the man just having some sort of crisis of self and just thought well if i if i look good maybe i'll just succeed i think i think it's sort of fake it till you make it which sort of works if you're trying to like get a job in marketing or something it doesn't work if you try to run a nation and rebuild the roman empire so as well as losing a third of his merchant fleet uh his shit his navy has no aircraft powers the aircraft carriers they're short on fuel and manpower all of their submarines are being

run by junior staff for some reason that's an odd choice yeah and the British had broken all their codes so not having a functional navy fucks their supply situation as you know because they have to

ship the supplies to Benghazi or to Brook or worse to Tripoli yes yes right finally I feel vindicated and then drive hundreds of miles back eastwards yes yes they do yes they do one estimate uh puts the italian trucks uh and this supply effort using 60 of its fuel to get

supplies to the front that is probably correct yes so richard berg's probably nailed that and then you've got the first move of the war just to build on this ineptitude on the 10th of september But they move forward and they do a massive artillery bombardment on empty positions the British had left days ago. Right, so they're also just getting the attacks wrong. They have limited ammo and they waste it on a huge artillery bombardment on no one. Right, careful because this is feeling a little bit too close to home. uh there's also a story of the 11th for sars uh watching uh the maletti division try to navigate

through the desert and getting lost and the 11th for sars are apparently like overlooking them too far to be shot back at just laughing at them as they're like trying to navigate with like compasses and incorrect maps yeah this is i feel you know what i can see why you made some of these decisions i think it's a smart guy would make these errors i think that's completely normal well uh we'll do a quote from rommel's chief of staff to sum up the italian situation the italian soldier was at a disadvantage compared with us as far as weapons equipment and other imponderables were concerned he was neither equipped nor to prepared to fight a war against european opponents armed with modern weapons because the fascist regime had neglected the armed forces the army

in particular was at a disadvantage in respect to tanks anti-tanks artillery anti-aircraft and defenses you just rattled all of them off that's everything yeah a considerable portion of the army's guns was composed of booty collected from the collapse of the austro-hungarian empire their wireless posts were not in position to transmit or receive while on the move they had no field kitchens and their rations were insufficient their industry was not equipped to meet the requirements of armed forces during a war of a long duration i saw one thing saying that if from 1935 they'd doubled their production like instantly that year they wouldn't have actually been ready for the war they were gonna fight until 1943 which you might know is the end

of this uh they just didn't have the industrial base but they had booty you just said they had booty oh yeah from the uh austro-hungarian empire that's run a bit we'll do the british side of this next week yeah i think uh it'll be interesting to hear if that's as terrifyingly mishandled but i have a funny feeling based on how things go probably not i'd say it's weird uh the italians had all the men and no preparation the british had very few men and prepped very well i i'm interested to see if it's uh low accurate when we delve back on all of this after i think maybe after the scenario is finished yeah we'll be able to look back and see how these units compare to i'm getting a sense though that the the plane numbers feel right yes i'm not directly compared

them but they feel right the i've not looked at the breakdowns of your division but by the sounds of it your divisions might be smaller than my full divisions possibly even though i think obviously i still have less i have 30 000 men to a quarter of a million but i wonder if that's why the sevens performed well so division versus the black shirts yeah maybe the divisions were quality versus quantity yeah um but also i guess quantity the actual divisions themselves may have been uh smaller in the number of divisions but the divisions were made up of more uh more men and also just more formidable men who are well prepared and have radios yeah i think it's just this it is this thing of like one the quote of mussolini of like

i need a few hundred dead bodies so i can negotiate he just didn't take the war seriously despite everyone telling him and also this thing of aesthetics versus reality of like if we look shiny enough and we have enough divisions on paper we'll get what we want it is a complete disconnect from reality yeah and it costs so much so many lives well yeah well he said i need a few dead men to negotiate and half a million italians died because of that yeah it's terrifying looking back and i guess not even just looking back i mean it's it's rife across the world through history even now these decisions made by people who just seem wildly short-sighted yes but are able to make those calls and the the just vast scale of tragedy on the back of that is just terrifying yeah and it

yeah it sort of snaps me out of the game sometimes when i'm like oh god this was this was just horrible yeah this was just an awful series of events and all orchestrated by awful people and it's just avoidable is is the the issue well i think an important part of that is from that quote by romwell's chief of staff is they're not prepared for war against a european opponent they've been fighting in ethiopia doing the libyan gen like they've not been fighting a comparable it's not ever they've been like doing colonial shit yeah it's not been military on military or at least not comparable military it's been completely outweighed and when it comes to an actual war like you say he's not taking it seriously no i mean how can you take it seriously

when there's booty involved your associate booty that's a reference that if anyone can get that reference um i'd be genuinely impressed that's that's i'm deep cut but booty um scooby-doo and the zombie pirate island you know halloween theme that's that's scary that goes nicely into my common ground is it which scooby-doo film is the best scooby-doo film no it's much more demanding than that oh okay well i guess on the back of this because you know what when we started playing the day you will you can probably attest uh i i distributed a lot of vitriol in your direction um after your truck bandits did what they did but then i got one of the groups of truck bandits so i felt a bit alleviated nonetheless there is still the need for some

common ground and now for something nicer a little oasis in the wall it's time for some common ground i'm trying the intro for common ground i'm recording maybe so for the uninitiated and there shouldn't be any everyone knows common ground we're all here together this is our common ground this is this is where we get to our disconnect from reality and then we we put together all the pieces that make us all one entity so on like a cult yeah so we walk away we walk away old friends we can we can keep on doing this every week if we do this at the end so common ground we find a topic that we have to agree on and we alternate which means

andy this week it's your suggestion for a common ground that we need to find yes we should be using science to make cryptids real why what do you mean why well i guess first and foremost it's sort of the point of common ground we have to talk about this otherwise the episode's done now but secondly i don't understand why you'd want to do this that's mental okay i have two sort of options for how this would play out i'll present we'll see how you feel about both of them or either of them okay option one cryptid park which i understand is based on i'm basing this idea on jurassic park i'm glad you said everything went wrong we'll get better fences sorry it wasn't the fences that were the issue it was right okay sorry i'm cutting you off continue

i disagree but continue okay option two top secret multinational project where they make cryptids reel in labs in secret and then release them into the environments they claim to be in so you take like a chimpanzee you genetically modify it into bigfoot and then you secretly release it in the like pacific northwest or you're like make a loch ness monster and sneak it into loch ness you're giving me a lot of what you can do with it but you still haven't answered the why cryptids are cool it's halloween and we can harness science now to do great and terrible things so just because it's halloween you think it's fine to release monsters actual monsters into the wild what what happens then then like then they kill people i presume well i'm

i was smiling myself picturing have you seen those like bigfoot hunting shows yeah there's like one them where the producers are sort of like sniggering behind their hands at like a guy walking through the woods looking for bigfoot and then an actual bigfoot just tears out of the woods and just attacks them so you are making just to clarify vicious monsters they are going to kill it's just going to be like a bigger upright gorilla probably this one is for bigfoot yeah Yeah, for Bigfoot. And it is, again, I need you to actually acknowledge what I'm saying. It's going to kill people.

I mean, yeah, it's a highly dangerous animal. It's not. It's your choice. But it'll make the world a bit more magic. It's your choice to make it. Don't fucking throw the word magic into this. That's crazy. Because people won't know where it came from.

They'll just know Bigfoot's actually real. And they won't know it got released, like, two days ago. They will. No, it's a top-secret project. Who's running it, though? it's a top secret multinational project what do what do the other nations have to gain from this apart from a few dead tv producers advances in genetic science that tv producers don't have to die for science to advance that's just one scenario yeah sorry you're right the other

one was a theme park where innocent people die again no because a lot of good fences are you against us you said better fences oh you say anything about good fences are you against us using science to make cryptids i right that's a nuanced question i'm i think there's i think i want to be involved in the project yes well yeah that's all these common grounds where it's like we're gonna live underground or whatever it's like i'm in charge yeah like if i'm in charge of it like would i want to be involved in producing a monster yes but but i i would want to be involved in producing a monster in a sort of like i'll bring it back around scooby-doo i want to be you know scooby-doo 2 monsters unleashed uh vaguely it's the one where they

make actual monsters um jonathan jacobo figures out how to do it um seth green's in it and he's kind of a nerd and um and at one point scooby wears a turtleneck okay um i've given a very holistic overview of the film but that's kind of a whimsical way for people to make monsters like you've got the monsters but no one's really dying yeah that's because of Scooby Doo

they're terrorising Coolsville but I don't think there's a body count I'd be fine with those monsters because it's a kids movie I'd be fine with that I want my spooky stuff to be spooky but at the end of the day it's like oh well that was horrible but I guess

you know monsters were real for a little bit but now we fixed it all because scooby-doo helped i'm happy with that like you modify like a bonobo so it looks like an alien gray and then you like leave its corpse in a fake ufo wreck right so again the use of the word corpse so we're talking about things having to die for this project look i just want an incredibly elaborate scientifically advanced practical joke to make all the people who fall cryptids were real vindicate it okay there's there's a there's a twist on that which i'm not opposed to okay we're getting there it's it it plays into something i think a lot more insidious because it plays into this whole um parading people who are

clearly, you know, invested in something that they care about. They've went down a rabbit hole and it's not always accurate. And I'm talking about the harmless ones. I'm talking about these people who are, you know, invested in the idea of Bigfoot. If they want to go out, if they want to go and try and find Bigfoot in the middle of the forest, more power to them. If you want to go and find the Loch Ness Monster, that's how they want to spend their weekend. That's a hobby. That's fine. I'm okay with that. If people want to bully these people and, you know, sort of spoil their hobby i don't think that's very nice i think you should be able to go off and find the loxas monster if you want to and it's all about the journey isn't it that's fun unless we actually

have a loxas monster there i think you're looking at this from the wrong angle because you you pulled on an idea there a thread that i'm i'm happy to pull on with you and it's these cynical people who exploit these adventurous souls i think these exploitative people they deserve to get some comeuppance being ripped apart by a genetically modified bigfoot i think i think maybe you've got you've got an idea in mind yeah and it's not exactly the idea i have but i'm trying to walk you back in my direction andy okay i think i think these um these tv producers that we've we've mentioned um i don't know who they are i don't imagine they're very successful because they're they're clearly predatory um i think they should have their comeuppance they

should they should encounter one of these real monsters i don't think they should be brutally murdered by them because then they can't feel the shame that they need to feel okay but i feel like they need to they need to they need to feel embarrassed they need to be scared out of their line of work i think all of there's so many programs where they prey on people who you know are just trying to live their happy life. They just want to do their thing. And the tone of all those shows is like, ha, look at these idiots.

Exactly. It's, oh, these people are freaks. These people are losers. Let's poke fun at them. What if they were right? Yeah, what if they were right? What if we spin it round and we do a program where it's a sort of the behind-the-scenes thing where it's sort of like the point where you'd usually have someone

dressing up in makeup and getting ready for the prank, but instead we're in the lab making the monsters yeah and then it's a case of all right so we know that these people are going to try and do a big gotcha thing on all of these you know individuals that are hunting bigfoot and then we release bigfoot and then the producers have to deal with an actual bigfoot yeah we we need to put into a the situation a safeguard that means they're not going to be brutally murdered because this way the people that are out there trying to fulfill their hobby vindicated they're happy they've

seen bigfoot the producers terrified their whole worldview has been turned upside down monsters are real now and i don't mean that from like a perception as reality thing monsters are real now it's scary yeah we made them real yeah i made them real in this situation because i'm involved in the project so i i get the satisfaction of making a monster and you know that's cool and i wouldn't be opposed to that i'm actually quite giddy at the thought i'd really love to make a monster andy okay so i actually went too far i should have just said let's make cryptids real i think so i think if you didn't try and justify it with the brutal murder of civilians um maybe i would have immediately been more on side well i guess we need to go on this journey

we do i think that's what that's what halloween's about halloween is about making monsters real for a little bit safely. It's not about people being murdered by monsters, because that's actually scary. And that, you can't put that one back in the box. That lasts after Halloween.

Okay. And this is just a day. This is Halloween, right here, right now. You just get one of them a year. That's it. That's all it needs to be. One little day of fun. I timed this well. You did. You did. And I think we have found a common ground

it's fine for monsters to be real sometimes as long as you can put them back in the box at the end of the day so at the end of that we store them away, we cryo freeze them and we bring them out next year a sort of cryptid purge cryo cryptids

cryo cryptid purge yes, that's what we do and that Andy, that would be my favourite scary movie that would be an incredible B-movie series It's the X-Files It's reverse X-Files It's if Mulder and Scully were like

Not like I want to believe It's like I want to make this work I want to make a monster Go on Scully Let's get into the lab Is it Mulder who's the sceptic? No Scully's the sceptic So it's just Scully in a lab going

It won't work and Mulder going it will and then he's right every episode as he makes a genetic monster scully would really struggle to push back on that one well yeah they're involved yeah at that point she they're kind of involved in the program as well i don't know i think it's uh yeah i'm not going to try and get into the x files it's too long and i haven't seen the whole thing so i'll not pretend to be an expert but the only thing i am an expert on andy is farewells so goodbye thank you all for listening and stay subtle humble and brave and watch out for those cryptids in the deserts of your mind because unfortunately once a year they're real and they're coming they're coming

for all of us oh my god no We'll be right back.