War With A Mate - Episode 71: The Chill Guys Empire

Episode Date: April 10, 2026

What weighs more; a tonne of fission or a tonne of candour? The guys clash in the climax, and conclusion of Turn Four, with James finding his supply line in a shocking state and Andy making a tactical movement poised to sucker-punch James’ defences. A Sultan filled history segment, a celebratory mailbag and a cunning-fuelled Common Ground are all in store, grab it while you can!

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Because we have your number. Hello, hello, hello. Goodbye, farewell. Thank you for listening. Condensed that one. Short, snappy, get it done. yeah i feel like we're dragging these out too long we don't need an hour an hour and a half i think four seconds is probably the prime time for snappy content these days well tiktok

youtube shorts they've shown that people want short form content that's what this is this is an incredibly short form content podcast war with a mate with me james me andy in which we will be short forming the entirety of the campaign for north africa the desert war 1940 to 1943 which i guess an hour to an hour and a half podcast once a week is the short form version of this game yeah that's a good point we're already doing it we don't need to reduce it anymore we've already scaled it down massively the game scaled down the wall you've scaled down the game and then i imagine at some point tiktok shorts will scale down the podcast even further and then from there you can just look at still images from the tiktok and youtube shorts of the podcast and then it's a

singularity and then you just think about it yeah in one perfect moment but instead for now before we find that perfect ebb and flow we're just going to talk about what we did today and just like that turn four is over yes we've uh we made it two thirds of the way through look at that it only took us nearly a year and a half and most of the practice scenario is done we have turns five and six to go but then that's it then we're free from the shackles of the practice run and we instead are bound eternally by the much heavier shackles of the main game yeah less shackles i guess we're buried under the earth with this i feel like i could i could one day break free from the chain and run out into the wild be a free man again but after this we are we're done

it's over a trap our lives are following a set course oh well should we talk about what we did today instead of pontificating about i guess essential dread we've given ourselves that's going to happen anyway so we may as well so today we wrapped up the end of turn four up stage three of turn four it was pretty good on my part i was pretty pleased with the outcome we wrapped up the end of your movement yes which was your engagement with the seventh armoured clashing with the division and the fourth indian going once again toe-to-toe with the bardia garrison fourth indian sort of just smashed the garrison made them retreat yeah we had a lot of parallels actually because on both engagements you lost five percent and i lost twenty percent

yes and in both engagements i was forced to retreat one hex yes and that all played out more or less shot for shot the way i've just said it except for the fact that the bardia garrison not the maletti division not the bardia garrison they moved two hexes instead of one yes they moved further than they had to just so you could set stuff up yeah i tried to create a bit of a choke point for your guys try to make sure that you couldn't go too much further than i wanted you to yep which paid dividends because after you losing that five percent me losing those 20 it meant i then got to have my movement which was great the only the conflict that nearly happened was your New Zealand division

trying to take on the detachment from my trivially regiment. Yeah, they just moved to Hex and then your guy retreated, which I was sort of expecting. It was just, get out of here. Yeah, I wasn't really going to have much luck with that. So I had to flee.

I wasn't going to be surviving that. So funny thing, if you play what I just messed up in reverse it actually is The Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin Seems unlikely I'd love to know if anything does come out of that

if you play it backwards If only there was a way to find it Unfortunately not, this is only recorded in audio forwards so you can't listen to it backwards This isn't the Nolan film Tenet I'm not Robert Pattinson Don't I know it

Wow wow kick me when i'm up that meant uh yeah we we had a little uh little scuffle in my movement because i moved around the 63rd serene division and my second black shirts both of which are mostly unscathed 63rd have lost some guys from breakdown and a little bit from a kerfuffle and the second black shirt division are completely unscathed a virgin division yes untouched by the horrors of war i guess historically they probably did a lot before now yeah but in the game this is their first time they boxed in the seventh armor division both of them coming up against them i let off a barrage which was very successful i tried to barrage all four of your infantry and

i managed to actually pin two of the four yeah you're scattered one barrages of really paying dividends yeah i was really happy with that great outcome i only put one barrage point for each of because I committed six barrages so I could double up on two of them, and I did end up getting two of your guys on the first pass, which I thought was going to be great for the combat. However, you made sure that didn't happen by retreating immediately. Yeah, so I just decided to leave. Yeah, cowardly move.

I guess, but it worked out. Didn't lose anyone. Yeah, you lost a little bit of respect from me. That's fine. Yeah, but what would you rather have, an intact division or my respect? an intact division or my respect yes that was the question no i answered it but what would you prefer to have an intact division oh no you know i don't think you're grasping the question so we'll i just don't think you can handle any form of rejection i'm gonna choose not to hear

the second part of what you said either i know unless it's validation i'm afraid i can't allow it in my my life i need to live in an echo chamber with no criticism and no pushback and you can barely handle that even then i will buckle on contact with air so i think we both felt this combat went and like upstage went pretty well for us i mean you chipped off a fifth of both of those divisions that i had in play well one of them wasn't a division one one's a big garrison yeah Yeah, and I did 30% of them last session, which is part of this turn as well. Yes, previously you've done some heavy hits.

So it'll be compounded percentages, so it won't be quite 50%, but it'll be pretty close. It's still not a very pleasant loss to take. It's part of my plan. I mean, my plan was to have those guys eat up some of your CP, some of your ammunition, some of your positioning. and it worked well because on the back of this

you've pushed forward, I've then retaliated with my guys, I've not had to really use any ammo apart from the barrage which I could take and I've then pushed you back and pushing you back that way earns me some cohesion, loses you some cohesion. You don't get cohesion

I don't gain it at least that's not what we've been doing what's the wording on that one again? It's when they force the retreat yeah you did opt for a retreat. So you lose the cohesion, but I don't gain it. We might be doing that wrong, but the way we've been doing it

for the scenario at least is... Yeah. We should double check that, just to make sure. But I think, either way, I'll happily take that, whether or not I gain the cohesion. They definitely lost three. So, my guys.

Yeah, and I've then eaten away at the ground that you took. Yeah, it's gone. Your guys have moved way further back. the uh seventh they moved further back than the track they came up from no they're back on it they didn't come up the escarpment track oh of course no they came along the side yeah because i briefly had that like little triangle yes yes but i've lost that now and i also pulled after the second conflict with the fourth i moved them back to the supply dump yes the one that

trails off from fort maddalena yes two reasons for that one might as well just resupply them why not and also um there was an exposed truck convoy there so i was thinking if i don't put the fourth there you might break someone off and like loop around and grab the convoy which would be not great that is what would have happened yeah if you hadn't done that i would have absolutely pushed a unit as far as they could go to make sure that they got those trucks yeah because then i've got your trucks i know what that feeling is i know what that devastation is the morale hit you take in real life would be astounding i was left crying every night after we would play just because of the stress of the game nothing to do with the trucks i'm just bearing my soul here

it's just revealing a lot of mental fragility that's what generals should do no it's not no it's not it's all about candor no candor is the single most powerful force in the universe no it's not fission there you go is the most powerful force in the universe fission and candor are cousins they meet each other from time to time family events gatherings and weddings of distant relatives they see each other in the streets and they know their family but for some reason they don't speak to each other. Because they're not really related in any way.

Their grandad was friends with my auntie and somehow that makes us cousins. I don't understand how that works. Can someone explain? Yeah. I don't like that stuff. And yet, fission

and candor. Okay. If we had to be one each. I'd be fission. You think you'd be fission? Yeah. Only by default, only because I'm so candid. Sure, whatever you have to tell yourself. I'm really candid, so you'd be fission by default. Otherwise, if candor wasn't in this,

if it was fission and being taller than me, then you would be taller than me and I would be fission. No, I'd just be both and you'd be nothing. Ooh, that one smartened a little bit. Being told I'm nothing is, well, that's another tearjerker for James. That's one of my triggers. being told i'm not yeah that's actually that's a fair trigger yeah if we bring down the walls of irony that's completely permitted when it comes to the rest of my movement i rejigged some of my

guys i thought why have a bunch of guys that are ill prepared and ill supplied ready at hellfire pass for you to attack them when i could switch them around which is what i did those guys that were battering down on your truck bandits outside bardia they have now come up to the top of half pass and are ready to take on anyone who comes through that little that little roadway and the first and second libyan divisions are taking a well-earned retreat outside bardia after having popped in for some supplies and the first i think it's it's either the first or fourth i think it's the 4th Blackshirt Division, are now

resting up in Bardia. Okay. It's well earned. They have taken a battering. I guess I'll allow it then. They've had a nap up there. They've had some supplies. What was incredibly shocking is what followed

from that. Because after repositioning, having our little skirmishes, and then the truck convoy movements, I found something amazing had happened. I went through my usual motions of doing the supply runs up along the top to my airfields. I've now got airfields on map A being fully supplied.

Well, not fully supplied, but supplied by the trucks that I put over there last offstage, or the one before, rather. And the trucks that were in Bardia, I've now taken them back, the ones that were stolen by the truck bandits. So I've had those doing some zipping around. My big break-off truck supplies from the black shirts that arrived have also been doing their bits which meant by the end of that when it came to we haven't quite done store expenditure yet because that'll be the start of turn five but what it does mean is i don't

have any units that are actual units worth using that are not fully rationed which is a monumentous moment yes that's a big one for you those guys being able to pop in i've essentially had four divisions five pop into bardia during that movement yeah and take in some supplies to their trucks and that place has just been sat as a huge stockpile of supplies between just having them naturally and then having the naval convoys the coastal ones drop stuff off they've just had so many stores ready to use yeah that i haven't dipped into so they are now eating pretty sitting pretty i've got some guys that aren't fully stored up but they aren't guys who are going to do any offensive action yeah so i'm fine with them taking that hit one of them i think i'll need to double

check this but one of them i think will now suffer attrition oh okay because of the two turns in a row of no stores it's like two percent isn't it yeah it's not huge it's not huge but it's it's significant enough that i'm not thrilled about it no but these are also units that i'm i'm prepared to lose so having that as a come away from turn four that i'm now in a position to fully stock up my guys i feel like i've become a master of logistics i am the genghis khan of north africa Okay And you are the Gavin King of North Africa

Who's that? That would be Genghis Khan's name if he was born now If you were to transpose that to a sort of typical western name Khan being king Genghis being universal Close enough to Gavin No

It hits a lot of the strides that Gavin hits Genghis and Gavin don't have quite the same gravity. Sorry to any Gavins, it's small that Genghis has got a lot of weight to it. Only because of Genghis Khan. Yeah, but that's a big

old only. Only because of one of the most remarkable men who ever lived. Two syllable G words. That's what we're looking at with both Gavin and Genghis. Genghis. Genghis. I'll edit out

Genghis. I have the power. i never edit stuff out i always say i'll edit this out and i just keep it in i go through the edit and i go well i'm just going to keep this apart from when we've doxed people backs and i edit that we haven't done that in like seven or eight months yeah we got better at that we're doing great with that stay tuned for the mailbag segment maybe we'll slip up this week oh there's there's no promising but we always catch it in the second line of defense yeah i think my supply Right, now I've got that supply dump at Sidi Barani. Yeah.

That's opened up the southern desert area a lot. Until I destroy it. Yeah. I mean, yeah, if you do destroy it, it's a real issue. But until then. I'm just wondering how many engagements you can keep going without having to supply. Because if I can take off that supply dump,

break up those supply lines a bit. I need to figure out who I'm going to put in the middle, though. because i need to have someone who can cut off your supply line which means being quite quick but also can hold their own against likely a division or two yes because i have also realized the way to get rid of a full division what like reliably yeah what's the i'm not telling you this sounds like a uniform plan uh no it's if they can't retreat without going through a zone control yeah they surrender so if you can pincer oh that makes them surrender because they can't they have no valid um retreat i thought it was that if you don't retreat you take more um

percentage loss if it's you can't or won't leave that hex i remember seeing something about if they have to retreat but can't because the zones of control i'll have to look it up again but we'll definitely double check that because i remember my findings on the having to retreat is where we found the you can opt not to and take the 10 hit yeah i'm sure the wording was won't or can't right yeah we'll give that a double check but if that does work then i guess the positioning becomes more important yeah because if i can flank someone one of your guys because that little pass down there where the escarpment is that seems like prime position for me to box one of your guys in yeah i think because of the hexes you'd need three yeah you'd

have to have like a three-pronged attack so you yeah you can't just have one on either side no because then they exit the other sides although a nasty place to do that is again near the escarpment if i come up like two along the top like yeah sort of um northwest and northeast and then you have to retreat up the escarpment yeah or pin someone against the sea yeah at which point they also i guess have to surrender because you can't you can't swim your way out of that trucks are done we moved on to initiative for the next turn we haven't quite done all of the yeah we just wanted to see so we still need to do the naval convoy and store expenditures but we just wanted to know who was going first and i couldn't find my notebook with

my naval convoy stuff in yes because we've made the horrible mistake during this practice run of slowly drifting from entirely digital records to stuff that's on scraps of paper notebooks and note section on my phone which is another reason we can't really reliably broadcast all of the paper sheets we had a we had a comment on one of our episodes on spotify asking if we have paper records or like written records and it's like we do but you'd have to accept them in four different forms at the moment and some of them i don't know the date order of i just know what the most recent one is because it's the one at the latest point of my notebook that isn't full of either that or dnd combat stuff yeah i haven't optimized that but that's part of what's coming

in the main game so you once again have initiative uh yes i think that's going to be pretty consistent until you get the germans and then i think it's going to directly flip i think it is like a one for one in terms of the plus because you go from one to five if there's any german six if there's rommel yes that's a big change mine gradually goes up but it's turn based i think you might get another one at the least land yeah i think it's like turn one to 40 something i'm it's free and then it goes four then five yes that sounds right yeah i wouldn't be surprised if that lines out with least land so you're now having to pick who goes first again yes now you could you could keep this pendulum going of people getting double turns

or if you want to hit equilibrium again i guess you have to do exactly that and give me another double turn where i go no i can just go first never mind no you're good yeah you can just yeah go back to it so what what you're thinking so far um i'm actually weighing it up because i think because it's quite static in terms of like the wall yes i don't know there might be a benefit to letting you go first and then reacting yes seeing what i do with my guys yeah because i do i do have the sixth now yes they've come along um they're they're on maps yes so are the polish under 60 so i basically got everything everyone who's gonna be fighting

like there's no one left to come yes you've got the seventh and fourth that are hanging around the top of the escarpment yes you've got the second new zealand that are in that little strip along the north coast yep pinned by the escarpment and then you've got the the new guys that have come along that are just sat just on the cusp of Map C, I believe it is. Yeah, they're at City Barani now. Four divisions. Yeah. But the 2nd New

Zealand and the 6th Australian are missing like a third. Okay, cool. So they're not at full strength at all then? No, that comes later in the reinforcement tables. But like, quite a while. Four divisions versus

I mean, to rattle some of mine off, I've got three Blackshirt divisions that are full because the third black shirts aren't a full division three black shirts two libyan maletti 62nd and 63rd so that's what eight nine divisions i vaguely remember you having nine before yeah so i've gotten yeah like double the amount of divisions that you have yeah um one of the black shirts and one of the libyan are whittled down now to a stump yeah and the maletti are taken heavy hits as well so we're getting to the point where i've got realistically six divisions that are in full effect yeah i will say i think division for division i'm better off

and the actual divisions yes yeah i think like the fourth and the seventh are probably the two most dangerous divisions on the map yes it's just limited in to only being two divisions well i don't think i've had a proper clash with the seventh when they've been at full strength i think i've only ever fought them when they've had units broken off from them uh last turn this turn you did i guess well when i've been like attacking yeah but what i've been doing in retaliation is usually with like one actual strength point oh yeah so it's not really been a a good way to measure the one for one comparison it's been how well can they hold up against a landslide yeah and to be fair the answer is surprisingly well they took only a quarter of the losses that you

did sorry they took four times that you did a quarter would be at that point that's a very bad exchange for me it's turning out to be a tactic that is working out pretty well i'm happy with the way it's going turn four has been an interesting one because it's the pendulum has swung and now you're on the attack yes you're coming into into map c with eyes on bardia and to brook what do you think turn five has in store for us i think either the if the line sort of i've not disrupted it or made any progress against about the end of two and five i'm probably not going to yeah so it's i think it'll be a test to see if that line can hold three op stages to break that line yeah you need to fracture that line in some way for to brook and bardia to be a realistic

objective yes i do fortunately i've got my f force has got a big upswing because the um sgs used that the libyans killed are back yes at the they're actually at the airfields so they're ready to go and by the same merit my airfields are pretty well stocked i've got a lot of my bombers from map a that have been left unavailable for like turns at this stage they are now back in play yeah so we're gonna get maybe an upswing in air force i think we're gonna see a lot more air missions this coming turn um i can also continue to scale that up again because i've got more trucks available now the fact that i've got stores to everyone i need and i've also made a little dip into a nearby village to drop off some supplies along that you know the wall

along halfire pass yeah i've now used one of those villages as a supply dump oh nice so i don't need to worry about feeding ammo in too much when i can just instead have a guy dip out and replace after a fight yeah um so with that being the case i can break off one of my bigger truck convoys and do a just a big sweep round and get more bombers involved yes so i think my bombing run is going to be it's going to be a scary one this coming up stage i think you're going to remember what these bombing runs used to look like this is going to be a call back to turn one and two where it was hell for leather with those airstrikes yeah but yeah i've got a couple of things up my sleeve. We'll see if they

pay off. So you feel confident going into turn five? Or tentative? I'm not... I've got a plan, I think, in my wig, but again, I think it's like best odds of 50-50, maybe.

Yeah. So, like, not... It'll be like some... It'll come down to some dice rolls, and like Hugh gets a bit lucky i guess but it um yeah because i don't if i had a surefire 100 i'd be much happier but yeah we could be looking at some some nasty turns i think we're going to end up with a couple of combats where the modifier is more or less smack bang in the middle which is where we can

start seeing some heavy losses on both sides i will say fortunately for me my morale and cohesion situation is extremely good yes significantly better than mine when i was talking about your seventh and their cohesion being dropped you'd mentioned when we were playing that their cohesion was 10 yeah so even dropping that down to plus seven when some of my guys are at best on and this is best plus two yeah so and also your morale seems to just be a bit lower in general which makes sense for these italian and colonial troops yeah morale is minus two or minus three on pretty much every unit yeah i don't think i've got any that are plus oh the top my non i don't think oh wow i've got some that are minus one uh yeah i don't think i've

got any that are positive so it means going into these combats i need to account for that i need to be adding an extra actual point or two or six basically well yeah if i want to swing it directly over yeah but i mean just to keep it in a sort of fair balance which is where pinning your guys comes in very handy removing whole battalions yes that's a big one and just good positioning two divisions on one is what i really need to be looking at yes if i'm fighting you one-on-one division wise i'm not gonna withstand that very well i need to be doubling up i do have a thing where i depending if my how the plan goes i might take to brook but not bardia that's a bit of a wild strategy i don't know how that would pan out i don't even know how you would

maneuver that apart from swinging up through fort madalena and then cutting up north but that's so much open desert with and i promise you this no resources to pick up on the way that i think you just get to the gates and all i need to do is shuffle my guys up along that road from bardia to brook yeah and then i've got a wall held yeah i guess we'll see because it's more that there's so many things about bard around bardia that it might be better to just leapfrog it i guess yeah the benefit i have is that road along the top i can just dart between the two i can just hold half of them at bardia move the rest of them up to take on a resource starved seventh and fourth and battle it out there yeah and if

that's where i need to hold it then hold it i shall yeah because your two-thirds strength new zealand and australians i don't think can take on the other half that i leave behind i guess we'll see we'll have to yeah also i need to double check because it's a new turn uh reinforcement see if anything's come in um because this is probably the last i guess for you it takes so long to get from triple itania and tripoli that you're probably any reinforcements aren't going to be useful no the only guys that i have that are coming along are the 410 army which are it's sort of a shell unit right um they are they've been making their way over for the whole game i don't think they'll well they won't make it to the front line not unless i sent some trucks

over to motorize them they're also not that great they've got a good tool value i believe yeah but i think maybe i've got some planes but i could be wrong with that as well i think i might actually just be at the the end state i think i've had my last planes that could be it then i guess bearing in mind, transfer missions. If you want to get them to an airfield, that is viable for operations. Oh, yeah. Fortunately, mine arrive in Cairo or

Alexandria, which do have airfields. Yes. But I guess if they're fighters, then too far away. So yeah, you would need to transfer them over. Well, all that to come in turn five. The last third of the

practice scenario, Andy. Yeah. God, how time flies. okay i'm getting oh i do get something yeah seventh infantry battalion so that's an infantry battalion so probably not getting at the front and then an influx of 20 medium trucks and five lights as well all right the trucks are all good the trucks are a nice one yeah trucks are the bane of my life although now i'm back on good terms with my trucks yeah you've turned your sort of truck hatred around from the first turn or two.

I feel like I very much have Stockholm Syndrome of the trucks, where now that something is going well for one upstage, one turn, I feel like all of a sudden I'm king of the world. I feel like I'm top trucker. It's like the opposite of ice road truckers. Yeah.

Because it's a desert road. Probably a less entertaining show. I think it would be good. I'd watch it. I'd give it a watch, yeah. I'd especially watch it if it meant that I win this game but i don't know that that doesn't feel like a transferable skill no i don't know that i have any transferable skills that apply to this game apart from wasting my time that's the only one you need i feel like there's definitely more that's just the that's definitely a foundation

so should we get some uh some listener mail i suppose another good thing yes let's look into the mailbag we're talking about foundations this is what the whole podcast is built on accountability getting us through to the end of this and it's worked thus far now it's time to see it through to the the last third so let's see what's coming the mailbag not to be confused with different things that hold digital information such as my first thought was email inbox so it is exactly that yep it's an email inbox with emails and who we got first not joseph hello from chemist you have just doxxed fuck wow not even a joke we've got joseph cool um days without doxxing will rub off the whiteboard mark that to zero oh god fucking hell

hello from a chemist in america synthetic rubber for tires it's the subject hello andy and james found your podcast by a reddit post sent by a friend this friend and others and i are trying to get together regularly and have some passing interest in board game war games including undone it's stalingrad and axis and allies they sound like child's play i think i started listening to the podcast as a joke to check it out but soon found myself enamored with your guys banter and friendship oh good safe yeah i binged to catch up including a 12 hour road plus road trip and u-haul to move my sister you know it was bad when you are the reason i finally broke down and downloaded instagram sorry about that yeah that's a big compliment i've i don't think i've ever been

committed to something to the point where i've downloaded a social media network to access information about it so kudos joseph there we go uh i think i caught up near episode 61 or 2 after about a month or two of listening i believe episode 60 is where you said you were not that good at chemistry uh so i had to write y'all uh plus episode 68 begs for more emails yeah we went back into beg mode a little bit yeah also love the use of y'all another y'all put that in the y'all counter yeah uh i'm an industrial chemist uh in the southern us area with a thing for history on the side i'm surprised sbi's campaign for north africa does not include tires slash rubber as a resource to be managed almost all rubber before world war ii then was from latex from rubber

trees grown on plantations but that system was thrown into chaos as supply line and trade were disrupted leading up to world war ii transitioning from natural agricultural basis to chemical synthetic route is a very short number of years for a massive undertaking i've seen written if we hadn't been for the man manhattan project the synthetic rubber program would have been recognized as the largest and most advanced program running world war ii oh yeah i didn't know that but that's yeah yeah that is that is news to me it makes sense i guess yeah making rubber yeah having to grow it is is a huge again i don't know anything about chemistry i was bad at chemistry in school yeah so i don't know how what what the kind of yield is from a a rubber plant uh compared to

i know that they had a horrible system of getting it so i'm glad they're not doing that yeah that's a that's a bit of history that we've looked at we've got a snapshot of that like a couple years ago we found out about that and the practices used by king leopold of belgium let's just say is a bit of a rotter yeah that history segment would be an upsetting one early in the war ethanol was converted to butane for rubber uh that went into tires later butane technology would be utilized also gotta say i'm glad that that must be part of stores i'm so glad there's not a fifth oh you need to manage the tires and work out how much of the tires have been worn away by like driving because you could see them a whole system there for like i guess part of that's

been abstracted into the breakdown rules yeah it's safe to say it exists in some way maybe richard berg just ran out of time he's probably looked at wear tables for tires and like changed the breakdown ratings depending there is i imagine in richard berg's secret journal of extended plans there's probably tire wear that's that's in there somewhere yeah thank god he didn't have the time to put it in the game as part of my career i've worked for a company that had two sites constructed in the early 1940s for world war ii to make synthetic rubber under the u.s synthetic rubber program each site in the program has a plan call designation under the defense plan corporate corporation many other plan core sites were established all over the u.s for ethanol to

butane styrene monomer rubber production research and related technology nexia's butane company plan core 933 in port nexia's texas it's just an example of one uh i've attached a few pictures uh from a time when the plant was being constructed uh check them up on the instagram uh yeah yeah um that sounds really cool um i'm just having a look through them now that's yeah wow this is very much the vibe of uh of stuff i i wouldn't even begin to understand the the fundamentals of it but it looks yeah i mean some of the stuff is huge the equipment that's involved yeah i don't know how long ago this was that's a lot of filing cabinets 1940s apparently yeah you wore massive filing cabinets and they uh yeah amazing to see these

plants were built and running in just a couple of years scaffolding was just wooden structures around towers and lifting cranes of our current scale were just a dream we had vaults in our administration building that housed the designs and were labeled top secret property of the u.s government do you all have a an address we could send reference documents a po box uh you'd love to say uh unfortunately no we might get one one day but uh not at the minute yeah physical mail would be a fun thing because we've got a lot of people who've mentioned some um sort of journals of family members and that sort of thing not that we would ever recommend sending the original but copies or pictures anything like that so yeah watch this space so you'd love to send a coffee

a copy of Synthetic Rubber, a project that had to succeed by Vernon Hertford and Alito Bissio, as well as a book, The Devil's Milk, A Social History of Rubber. That's a fun book title.

There are also, I probably will check these out because I love those, like, niche dive in on one thing and how it affects the, like, wider... Yeah, I imagine A Social History of Rubber is not a book I would ever have read but would probably be fascinating like it's the kind of thing where you'd probably finish it and go now i understand how important rubber is yeah and i'd look at rubber in a

completely different light yeah but outside of that i would not care no thank you for making rubber interesting joe yeah for the podcast i'd like to make one suggestion you have segments common ground and history segment but i think the lesson mailbag segment needs a name how about messages from across the sands or messages from the desert winds or whatever you workshop i really enjoy you to enjoy the two of you talk and explain the game please keep up the great work sincerely joe uh thanks very much for that email joe i'm sorry for doxing you at the start we'll make sure that gets bleeped yes no one will know because i've edited that out no one will know your surname um but yeah really cool stuff joe yeah an area of science that i would have no

interesting but i will read into this because i like to if someone's sent it over and it's in depth obscure stuff i'll take an interest in that i love stuff like that rubber um yeah just again looking through some of the pictures on here huge machinery what do you think about the the mailbag segment and they were giving it a name i just think of it as the mailbag segment but i guess that isn't actually a that's just a description so yeah maybe we'll we'll workshop some names yeah we'll put something together we've already got the little sound effect for it i feel like anything intro wise apart from that might be a little bit too self-indulgent but we can give it a name yeah everything deserves a name probably like messages from across the sands messages from

across the sands is cool messages from the desert winds maybe i can find a way to shoehorn in deserts of my minds into that just a nice way to force in something that i just really like for some reason but thank you for that joe i'm going off on a tangent about my own hubris next up we have a message from milan who has been in touch with us before and the email subject is i'm a dad the email reads hello andy and james milan from texas again it's always texas i'm happy to announce that i am officially a dad congratulations fantastic fantastic work good work on the the partnership and then the the gardening the nine months which i imagine the nine months probably more so your partner's job but uh hey i'm sure you were supportive

and listening to the podcast that can only help you prepare for these things if you think a podcast is a long arduous thing for 50 years just imagine raising a child even more so my first son was born healthy and relatively happy i listened to episode 68 with him sleeping in my lap marking his entry into the war with a mate cinematic universe that must be a very relaxing sleep listening to our dulcet tones while having a an infant rest on you speaking of episode 68 you guys mentioned doing events such as weddings and james offered to come in full uniform i just want to state that given he is playing the germans that coming in an appropriate uniform is a very very bad idea andy please make sure that never happens i'll uh i'll try to make sure you avoid a sort of prince

harry-esque lapse in judgment yeah i'd like there's so many moving parts in having to get to that point of mistake i'd like to think i'd catch it well before then at least in like the costume store like well that's it you have to buy there's so many times you could turn back and the thing is i can't buy it from like a like an in-person thing i have to place an order you surely i don't want to go into a store that sells that yeah so it means that i'd probably have to go to a place that's not to probably buy off the dark web so i guess yeah there's so many restrictions in place beforehand i'd go maybe this isn't a good idea but regardless it's nice to have the words spoken allowed just in case as for the game itself it's exciting that the end of the practice round is on

the horizon yet today even more so an example of that with the real game coming up are either of you already making any hard plans for how you will play i could see someone in your position having a separate document somewhere planning supply lines and early troop movements now that i'm a father i strive to become more subtle humble and brave every day milan well i hope you succeed in that quest and i'm sure you will listening to the podcast is a sign of good character and strength of spirit as well as just a good moral center so i'm sure you'll do fantastic as a parent and by all means milan if you want to nominate your firstborn child as the heir when i die to continue playing the game because he'll be in his early 30s by then so yeah and your son will grow up

with this podcast learning how to play the game so a champion born into this the chosen one a paula treaties sort of character ready to take the mantle is perfect for me so i'm very glad that you've made that offer milan and i graciously accept going back to the plan andy do you have any hard plans for the start of the main game i don't have any hard plans i do have a google doc where i've listed like mistakes or things to like keep in mind but it hasn't turned into like a solid plan yet it's more just like a brain dump yeah i'm in a similar position where i've not documented stuff maybe as structured as you i've got a few notes on my phone for rough ideas sort of general strategies but it's all sort of like five or six different ways i could open the game

i just need to commit to one and i think once we've finished up the practice run especially now that i'm on the defensive this is a new thing i can learn about whether or not this defensive is particularly good although everything i've had drummed into me since we started the game or even before then is go hard on the offensive don't you know like all the way back to the echoes of war guys just being like a general sort of rule for playing the axis in games in general is go hard and fast because you'll eventually lose on the production you'll be like outproduced yes so i I think that is something I'm looking at in a broad sense. But when it comes to hard plans and when it comes to supply lines,

I will be doing that because I cannot afford to start the game the way I started this one. That's not a viable way to continue a campaign for North Africa. We'll have to happen. But I guess the answer to your question is no, we don't have any hard plans, which is kind of a worrying thought now that I'm saying that part out loud. i think i've got enough that i'm when i come a planet i'll feel pretty good about it yeah i know

i know enough of my broad plan that i i think i can come up with a solid strategy how that works completely different question and there's some of the like blaring mistakes i've been talking about from like early on like should i put something in sea where that's a big one i think the bottom of the map is going to be a much more heavy combat zone than it was when we started Well, we've had no combat there because I just basically ceded it to you, which wasn't a good idea. Yeah, it didn't have a whole lot apart

from it being a tactical position that I've held and then moving up the Saharan detachment to try and cause trouble. They ended up surrendering en masse. So I guess no harm, no foul. But the, yeah, the game will look very different. Great emails though. Thank you both for sending those in.

Congrats again on Fatherhood, Milan. I'm sure it'll be great. Yes, congratulations. and anyone who wants to send anything over whether it's another child announcement we can do gender reveals if you like we can we're willing to be godfathers

we've got gonna take my hat out of that ring well it's not really fair for you to do that now that I've said it I guess we'll have to live with some unfairness no you'll just have to

live with the the responsibility of several children under your care if their parents meet an untimely demise. But, if not, if it's anything more light-hearted than that, that you want to direct the both of us, then you can do so at our email inbox,

which is info at warwithamate.co.uk, the website, warwithamate.co.uk, or our Instagram, which is just warwithamate. Other interactions you may have, we have our first live show coming up at the UK Games expo may 30th times to follow but if you're at the uk games expo stop on by it'll be a swell time

or we'll bomb it'll be one of the two also if anyone is going please just fire a message in even if it's not to like read out on the show just to maybe get a sense of if anyone we who listens will be there yeah just so we know i guess how to gear this um is it going to be a lot of people who already know us or are we pitching ourselves for the very first time again that one it's gonna be that one but we'll organize something um yeah some sort of some sort of meet and greet we'll greet and we'll meet we'll we'll tell you our horrible stories of the game yeah and the things that don't make up the part that's to be fair we're pretty open i'm very candid andy i tell everything but if we were to take away from my candor how about you get

candid andy you tell stories that maybe dare i say aren't even yours to tell and i'm not talking about the surname of the email that we get i'm talking about of course the history segment yes let's delve into the past yeah the men of the long-range desert patrols were quite a sight on their return to cairo from a most trip the contrast between the east and west of the nile is very marked in the east we are absolutely not qualified to share views on history when and where are we we're back with the ottomans they are great um comfortable they can store things and a lot more history than i thought seating would have yes slight just before

we jump into the history segment a slight mention of our dnd things in one campaign we did get an ottoman that gave us advantage on charisma checks and lugged that thing everywhere in one of the most off-putting ways possible yeah i remember that you guys would like go into a meeting and just put their chairs away and get on ottomans now you'd sit down on it it gave you a was it advantage on charisma yeah it was really powerful that's why he fucked around with it so much because i'd like to think it's uh it's not one of the like sort of foldy out comp like you know the the compact no no we're talking like a because that campaign was a that was the the um victorian london after the alien invasion one yeah yeah so it's not like a one

where you can like collapse it just carrying around a full ottoman and then plunking it down in someone's office they're great but enough about dnd i guess some history some actual history i the sultan of sultans and the strongest ruler the loftiest king who defeats the kingdoms around the world and the shadow of allah in the earth i'm the son of sultan selim who is the son of sultan Bayezid, who is the son of Sultan Suleiman, Caesar of Rome, the Sultan of the Mediterranean Sea, and Black

Sea, and Thrace, and Anatolia, and Karam, and the city of Dulcarin, and Kurdistan, Iran, Damascus, and Aleppo, Egypt, and Mecca, and Medina, and Jerusalem, and the whole Arab land in Yemen, and many more lands that our

lofty ancestors conquered with their crushing power, and I conquered with my fire scattering sword that's suleiman the magnificent saying what we're all thinking i half expected after last week for this guy to be called john sulden i was waiting for a punchline on that but magnificent i guess is a that that's a fair title he's got a lot to his name yes so fair enough so last time the ottomans had appeared and Libya in 1551. They'd taken over the coast. You've got Janissaries administering, gathering taxes. The economy is primarily piracy, but also tribute from inland tribes, exporting a lot of

salt. And the Ottomans also opened up the cross-desert trade caravans, which facilitated trade with the rest of Africa over land. So in Libya, the Ottomans will let the region get on with it as long as the taxes keep flowing uh the main pirate cities are algiers tunis and tripoli their power rose to the point that in 1611 the pirate leaders got together and put on a coup uh replacing the appointed ottoman leader with one of their own leaders despite this they remain part of the ottoman empire they just sort of have a regional thing and like we don't like the guy you put in charge but we'll we'll stay it's like a weird coup well yeah yeah that's a weird arrangement i have yeah so they get a few effective rulers in a row until 1670 when you get

eight different leaders in a 10-year span the pasha which is the governor uh appointed by constantinople is reduced to like a pretty much entirely ceremonial role okay so yeah really knocked that down then yeah so we're going to take a slight detour we've done some broad sweep stuff so we're going to focus in on a specific event here the village of balmore on the south coast of island on the 19th of june 1631 a ship waits offshore the cruise leader murad rass went ashore to scout looking to avoid any serious resistance when he returns he declares we have found a good spot this will be a good trip 200 hardened pirates go over the side into the fleet of smaller boats they descend on this unsuspecting town in silence before murad res lets out a battle cry chaos

rains as pirates break their way into houses dragging residents into the street screaming at the villages and a patchwork of turkish arabic and english that they have to go to the harbor and be loaded onto boats oh wow yeah the pirate drums boom out uh signaling a withdrawal ships from the British Navy will be there soon, but not soon enough. Murad has captured 22 men, 33 women, and 54 children. They're crammed into the cargo hold, and the pirates head south towards the North African safe markets. During this journey, the Irish prisoners notice something curious, as well as Arabs and North Africans in the crew. It also contains many Europeans, including their captain a 61 year old uh hardened former privateer for the dutch

formerly called jan jan soon who himself had been captured by barbary pirates at one point and then converted to islam becoming a pirate captain oh that's an interesting move to go from yeah slave to well slaver yeah it's also a i think it's sort of indicative thing of the ottomans of like well if you show up and like give us value then you can be part of the ecosystem yeah it doesn't matter that you're like we're a dutch christian if you're willing to convert yeah again it's the like openness of it so you've got uh mentioned the jews being expelled from spain you've got like jewish pirates arabs europeans just all anyone who's willing to go pirates will be invited into the pirate ecosystem yeah uh yeah and they're kind of pirates kind of

privateers so some of it's sanctioned by the ottomans against their enemies like the spanish french portuguese some of it's just they're going places and kidnapping people yeah which seems less sanctioned yeah because what i just described there wasn't an uncommon or particularly special event at all thousands of raids happened like that over three centuries so despite instability this corsairs are capturing hundreds of ships the free pirate uh havens triply has the smallest fleet which is 14 ships whereas uh algiers has 40 over a 300 year period they'll take 1.5 million slaves from european coasts fuck that is a lot yeah population wise as well back then yeah that's a huge swathe of these guys are like they affect like global economics like there's

treaties with these guys trying to handle like their effect on shipping countries end up paying them just tribute i mean yeah you'd have to if they're if they're showing up and taking i mean what that's like a couple hundred people that's like a hundred people there and then just doing that over and over and over yeah yeah a huge swaze of the population being hit with that kind of what tragedy yeah so that's what's happening on the libyan coast um just to whiz back over to the ottoman empire to give you a sense of what's going on with them as well this period so like the up to um 1566 around this period is a golden age for the ottomans under suleiman the magnificent its use of gunpowder makes it one of the best militaries in the world uh they also have one

of the best admirals ever uh grand admiral barbosa oh uh barbarosa but oh for a moment i was like i know this guy yeah so they control most of the eastern mediterranean they're also fighting the portuguese in the mediterranean in the indian ocean and the Spanish. They're just fighting these guys constantly. Suleiman also creates the Kanu-i-Ossimani Ottoman laws where he consolidates all the rulings and disparate laws they've had for the previous 300 years and makes a single codified law.

Oh, really condensing it down. Yeah. Magna Carta in it. Yeah. So Amang is the magnificent. He also gets called the lawgiver. He's got a lot of names, this guy. this guy was a very interesting guy because it's also a golden age of architecture art and culture

suleiman himself is a poet who publishes under the pen name muibi which means lover oh yeah got a bit of a romantic streak in him yeah well also he well he had a lot of wives um but one of his wives was a consort from his harem who, like, against tradition in a lot of ways, he freed and married. So you've got freed, married, died, freed,

married, survived. Yeah. So yeah, there's a bit of, I guess, romance. It's also, it's his slave, it's not, let's not give him too much credit. Yeah, maybe romance isn't the right word. Yeah. He creates loads of schools and colleges everywhere, increasing education, and also creates

the community of the talented. which is what it says on the tin, basically. It's a high-end guild in the palace itself with, like, the best craftsmen from the entire empire. They'll get, like, Renaissance artists and stuff to come in. Suleiman himself, as well as a poet and a warlord and a sultan, is also a goldsmith. Oh, wow.

He is, like... He's a lot of Renaissance, man. Yeah, and I think that is... I guess they don't get considered in it, in, like, the European sense, but they're very much a european power like they're getting the guys who are doing like the jewelry for various european royalty are doing theirs like european courts are dressing in ottoman styles they're not like the barbaric threat to the east they get like portrayed as

they're like very integrated into european culture at this point yeah because if they've got that much of a a wide reach and you've got all these people who are being valued for their actual skills then you must have an output of high quality goods i would expect yeah because if they're also accessing things by means of these sort of raids as and when then they're probably getting in high quality materials high quality goods are being put out so i don't see why the world wouldn't make use of that yeah it's not like anywhere in the world has ever been above doing that no making trade with people who may not gel with them or the fact that they're committing evil acts that seems like they would and they're also there on the european end of uh and this is

a big problem for a lot of europe in their minds is they're on the they're the gateway between asia and europe yeah so the silk road runs through their empire so like all the trade from asia they're getting a cut off for a long time up until the age of discovery when they find the horn of africa oh yeah and that's why they're fighting the portuguese in the indian ocean because the portuguese are like we're gonna go and sail around and grab the stuff and sail it back ourselves and not give you a cut and they're like fuck that um but um so yes but suleiman dies in 1566 at the age of 71 at the siege of

Sisgeth. This is before the Ottoman victory, and what should happen is he dies. Everyone goes back to Constantinople to, like, have the new salt and sort it out. But his grand vizier keeps his death secret until the battle's won and, like, releases a bunch of, like, pronouncements

pretending to be him until they, like, win the battle. His weekend of burnings the wall. Yeah. Which feels like some very vizier-type stuff. it's very visceral yeah so his death and ushers in the sort of end of a golden age and the expansionist era it isn't the largest the empire will ever be but it's sort of the height of it in terms of culture economy how it is relative to the rest of uh europe and asia so the devrushim system we mentioned last time with the genesis yes this is where this starts to break down

for one mass production of firearms means cavalry kind of becomes obsolete okay yeah which makes sense you go from having like very expensive highly trained cavalry with like your knights and stuff to we'll spend that money would be better spent giving a thousand guys a musket so armies get bigger as well oh okay yeah because you're not spending as much on the like your cost per guy is lower yes which is a problem for them because they every four or seven years go and collect a bunch of kids and then like train them for 20 years which when you're trying to like field a massive army isn't a sustainable no method so it's losing its military impact and also the janissaries have got enough power at this point that they're marrying and

having kids and they want to give their sons or and their children their positions so it was designed to get rid of like nobility but just slowly sort of metastasized into a different type of nobility with all the weaknesses that come with that and their economy is also really struggling so america becomes a trade force in the world they're getting all these goods from the new world silver in particular causing inflation the changing trade routes i mentioned just means they're losing a lot of their issues and they're in constant conflict i've not gone through all their wars but basically if they're around they're at war with two to three super powers at a time basically they don't seem the quiet type no uh they're constantly fighting the

hapsburgs in northern europe so like hungary they just but the hapsburgs are just northern europe so they're just fighting northern europe right the catholic church so like spain portugal they don't like them because they're a muslim empire and also a major trade enemy yeah so you've got a theological difference as well as a material impact on their economy as well so they're constantly fighting these wars that aren't the kind of wars where you like refill your coffers at the end by looting everything you're not like getting so they're just whaling down the treasury so yeah the ottomans have had a golden age they're in a stagnation period um and we'll see if they turn it around next time so yeah we'll do decline and run up to world war one for the ottomans next

time and then whip over and do some barbary pirate wars after that hey yeah a bit of piracy uh i guess i wouldn't like to be part of piracy but it's fun stories yes it's we don't get too into what's actually going on yeah if you look at it with squinted eyes yes then it's a really cool story yeah if you if you look directly at it it looks back with an ugly face yeah well what i do know spoilers wise is um the ottoman empire doesn't make it all the way no because you can't you can't pop over to the ottoman empire these days no visit and have your uh have your goldsmith sultan who also is a poet yeah uh provide some fine garbs for you uh yeah that's that's not an option these days so i guess we'll see what the cutoff is and how they decline

because i don't know the exact hows and whys and whens yeah i just know the the end result of they aren't here anymore and it is interesting the way because a lot of european powers hate them obviously because of the piracy and the wars i wouldn't like that i'd be against yeah so there's like there's that but then there's also the we're building colleges and universities and public works it's like a juxtaposition is that like a dichotomy between yeah the like the violence and the culture of it which sort of exists in every empire but i think it's quite pronounced my empire would be very very easy to get on with it'd be a really friendly empire just the chill guys empire yeah you you just want to you just want to hang around them would be really nice there wouldn't

be any there'd be fun piracy but it wouldn't be like you know any of the the dark stuff it would it would just be quite light-hearted yeah we'd be on boats of course that's that's the key part of piracy empire yeah boats um you know setting sail cannons would be involved but it would be in a fun way yeah you'd want to be involved in a pirate ship fight because nothing bad happens you get hit with a cannonball you just you go to a farm i think you just want to play assassin's creed black flag i i don't think i do because i don't i don't have a good relationship with the assassin's creed games i played the first one and then i had lots of people tell me the rest of them are really good so i decided to not play the rest the old

spite you know what i don't even think it's spite i just think there's something about someone telling me something is great it turns me off from it it makes me think it's not worth getting involved in because there's too much pressure i'll just be sat there the whole time thinking well this has to be great or a i just won't fit in with everyone else's taste or b it's it's just bad and everyone's everyone's going to be annoying about it and they're going to say oh what did you think of it and i'll go it was all right and they go what about this part where where john snow did this and i'll be like well i guess that was that was all right and look don't get me wrong game of thrones is is good for a lot of it it's great in some parts but by the end i was i was corralled

into watching it right as the last season was coming out that's bad timing so catching up all the way through thinking this is a really good show actually i quite like this and then getting to the end and and that being the conclusion what a rug pull you should watch the night of the seven kingdom it's really good yeah but this i've played these games before i have watched house of the dragon that's gonna be all right first couple seasons yeah so you've watched night of the seven kingdoms but you haven't watched house of the dragon yes it's interesting went a bit out of order there well house of the dragon felt like more of the like political overarching house contest stuff definitely that whereas night of the seven kingdoms is more like a focused

primarily on like two characters in the ensemble yeah to be fair house of the dragon is kind of like that yeah it also um sort of narrows it down a bit yeah it does feel a lot more like you're focusing on like this one slash two families yeah and everything else is kind of on the peripheral but yeah i uh i don't know i've been i've been stung once before i don't know that i'll go back fair enough being stung hurts andy it does being hurt by a friend hurts more stabbed in the back stabbed in the front every week that's what i get from you just this constant barrage of sometimes literal barrage and this trickery the skullduggery i'm sick of it sick to my back teeth what's sick no skullduggery skullduggery i like when you break out skullduggery

Yeah, I try not to use it too often, because it's a fun one. You've got to keep the potency of it. And to keep the potency of our friendship, there's only one way to do it. Got some common ground. What you got for us? Some common ground. Common ground is, of course, the segment in which we come together to find a unified place somewhere where we can become friends again in the midst of this sandy, sandy war.

And I've got a suggestion, Andy. Maybe you can meet me in the middle. Okay, what you got for me? and now for something nicer a little oasis in the war it's time for some common ground i'm trying the intro for common ground i'm recording maybe my common ground this week it stems from experiences from earlier this month okay and my common ground is that on april fool's day we should shut down the stock markets to allow businesses to make for some really really experimental april fool's day jokes okay

that's interesting because we're gonna come at this from where i thought you were going was companies aren't allowed to get involved in this anymore but no i do i like this i like let's have let's go for it well that was what you just mentioned there is where i originally came from this yeah because i saw there was a weird trend this year and it was it was sort of very tepid because the thing that happened was um and people probably saw a bit of this on the news or social media is probably the most likely source of the the kit kat uh heist oh was that not real no so that that was real i believe that was real oh okay um unless i've been duped double so because that's a fun heist it was something like 11 tons of of kit kats was yeah it was like millions

i think millions of actual kit kats yeah um and loads of companies then put up stuff like mcdonald's i think put up one where they were like oh we we're so sorry to see that the kit kat heist happened and now we've got a kit kat mcflurry or kit kat pie don't ask us where we got the kit kats and then other companies followed suit and there was a lot of kit kat centric stuff yeah i saw a lot of a lot of bands put up a lot of stuff in terms of we've been hit with a lawsuit we now have to change our name so we'll be changing our name to such and such funny play on words um one band that i follow a punk rock factory they do covers of like disney songs and they'll do punk rock versions of of disney songs all right and they put up a statement

where they were like we we've been sued by disney we can't make any more songs it all felt very samey yeah everything felt like it was so gentle and i was just like well if you're not going to go the whole hog then don't do it at all and then i was thinking why are they doing this rather than exclude them from it why not find out what's making it so boring and dull because the reason they're doing this and saying oh well oh kit kat heist they clearly didn't commit a kit kat heist of course not and instead they put in oh we've got a funny product that's kit kat themed links the deodorant i think it's axe in other countries yeah they put up one where they were like they've new kit kat flavored deodorant or something yeah they've got a chocolate one um which is um like

dark temptation or something and they call it like double dark temptation and have pictures of kit kats on the can and it's like cool but i know this isn't a this isn't a prank this is a joke yes you haven't fooled me you've told a joke yes okay here's what i'm going to suggest because a lot of those things you're mentioning probably didn't happen on April's Fools. They're like McDonald's, like, oh, wink, wink, where did we get the Kit Kats? Yeah.

No more Twitter accounts where it's like a brand pretending to be like a personified thing and then they like talk to each other. You know, like when like Wendy's or Burger King or Twitter McDonald's or something. Yeah, stuff like that. I think you have to exclude that from that joke. we're just getting rid of that you're not allowed to do that anymore companies twitters are only for

like we have a product okay that that plays into this but april fools they can go they can go for it yes okay that works because part of it is they're putting out a low level of nonsense all the time yeah just let's focus it yeah really gentle approach because then you have these ryanair was ryanair did a good one it was a good spin on things where i don't know if anyone's seen ryanair the airline company uh budget airlines and they their social media presence is a very good one um the company itself practices uh very questionable very entertaining social media presence because they will just put out the most wild like tiktok videos and posts really funny stuff yeah and then on april fool's day they put up a statement where it was like

our our brand outreach has been um personified in a very particular way going forward we will be much more professional we're very sorry right and i thought that was funny because you could read that and go oh wow they've decided it's actually a prank yes and then you realize like could fool someone if it doesn't boil down to you look at the date and go oh it wasn't real then it's not an april fool's day joke well this is a general thing i don't think people understand pranks anymore because there's like videos of like yes where people will be like oh i'm gonna like pretend to throw my baby off a balcony and then my wife's gonna freak out and it's like she's acting entirely correctly with the information she had like a prank should be

like you weave a false reality so someone's actions are incongruous yes and that's the well that feels like what a prank should be not just doing anything you eventually have to defend as a social experiment just don't do it you picked out the exact same example i had in my mind when you started to say people have forgotten what pranks are because that was that youtube guy roman something yeah who that was a few years ago yeah he had like a doll and they had like a young child like yeah like a toddler and he pretended to like throw this toddler over a balcony and i i'd like to think the whole thing was staged and that he never put his wife through that because that is genuinely deranged it's trauma yeah i like there's no level of this is

funny where you can just counteracts them yeah that's that's genuinely messed up i actually remember an occasion where this is a different scale when you came around to my place for dnd years ago and you showed up and i was like oh yeah sorry um we can't do dnd today um you're gonna you're just gonna have to head back home and you're like okay and i was like april fools we're still doing dnd and you were like that feeling of oh i have to go home we're not doing our hobby today was worse than the reveal of all we are actually still playing it and it's that it's when the when the like funny moment afterwards of oh doesn't pay off yeah it's oh i've been had but if that is massively outweighed by the negative that you feel

and and that negative as well you say people misunderstand what pranks are that massively now comes from people not knowing what a prank is because being horrible to people or making people feel uncomfortable or upset yeah isn't a prank you can make people feel a little bit caught off guard and you can you know pull the rug out from under them and they can feel maybe a bit embarrassed or silly but if they don't get a big laugh from that then it isn't a prank it's it's bullying that you video yeah and you hope that then maybe you're going for the utilitarian approach of i'm gonna get more laughs overall that balance out based on on mills measure of utilitarianism that's not a prank no so with these companies we we strip this back we get rid of the

risk for them and we we make it so that they can do anything on april fool's day without an impact on their staff so it i don't think they actually do like it's basically a bank holiday sort of yeah but for basically so there's going to be no reactions to like or any like thing of like oh that's a stock manipulation yes it means by the time the market opens people have come to the realization or should come to the realization this was a joke yeah so you can you can start having jokes that feel significant mcdonald's can put out something where it's a a product or they can they can do something that's going to be you know a bit more risky they can say something like um from now on uh and i think stuff like this would be funny because it pokes fun

i think it people's expectations where maybe they go from now on all of our food will be vegan only yes what you're going to do then is pick up people who are because then the people who are like getting negatively affected by it are like humorless like how dare there not be meat and everything like that is someone like yeah like make fun of that attitude a bit because that's it i think if you spin it the other way it maybe becomes a bit more detrimental because if you if you rid the idea of like a vegan or vegetarian option you're getting rid of an inclusive element yeah but if you just say oh well we're only going to do vegan then people who are like well i want my meat what are you doing with my meat and then afterwards they go oh i see what

i've done i've got way too upset about something i shouldn't have yeah i've got on my high horse and yeah and i know people will they'll flood to make an argument for it but then afterwards when they realize it's a joke there's no moment where someone kind of goes well i i can't eat here anymore you just have a bunch of people going well i won't eat there anymore yeah it becomes entirely choice influenced and by the end of that day they're not gonna hold on to it so nothing matters it's also a good way to trial stuff sometimes because uh i don't know if you know about this but you know there was a world of warcraft expansion called like the mists of pandarian no no it was like there was all these panda themed races but they initially like

introduced the concept as part of like april fool's stuff and then people just liked it so they made one of the full expansions about it all right so it's also a way of like maybe we can like float a silly idea see does this have some hooks on it like are people like i wish this wasn't april fools then you get huge positive reception and go oh well actually let's give it a go and the best part about this is the fact that they can make these risky changes with no no risk to their business my favorite part of that is that it's an april fool's day joke yeah and the stock markets are open yes very good so all of these companies that deserve scrutiny and deserve to be punished for trying to play into the social zeitgeist they do all this they've been

told the stock markets are closed and then they get absolutely fucked because they look at their stock value they realize oh my god we've plummeted we've tried to make a big joke it has not landed well our value has crashed they did think we were all going vegan and everyone's offloaded like and then and then next year maybe they think about it maybe they shouldn't be maybe they just don't do it maybe they aren't actually fun guys maybe they are corporations that are really they're taken us for a ride so we're gonna we're gonna put it back on them and i think rightfully so and that is the common ground andy now we're gonna get back at them i like the april fool's reversal i'm a big fan of this i like tricking companies i think it's one of the best things that a person

can do if you can pull the wool over the eyes of a huge business and then they end up really upset by it i think that's very funny yes that really gets a chuckle out of me so if by the end of april fool's day a corporation has lost 15 of its value because of a joke then it's entirely of their doing they never have to get involved in this yes and that is that is what pranks being misunderstood is this is the this is the downstream consequence of social experiment youtube videos exactly is a 15 cratering in some poor meat distributing facility that everyone thinks isn't being used by mcdonald's anymore you've got to realize that people aren't always going to take well to a practical joke no and if that can happen on small scale it should happen on big scale

and this is a way for corporations to feel that punch it's the only time that we can get them to be tooled off en masse for getting involved in something it also has like a nice side benefit which is to spread the word from this you need some kind of infrastructure where everyone but corporations can get a message that's a good point that would be that i mean that which feels like a very useful thing to have but will backdoor it into society with this april fools thing yes because i do like the idea of common ground you can only come up with a an idea that's kind of plausible in its funny nature but it but because of that you're allowed to facilitate it with something much more grandiose and impossible to pull off yeah so that's that's my common ground

how do you feel about that it's worked we've come together on this one i mean i'm in total agreement and the best part is corporations the the big sort of entities themselves can't hear the second part of this common ground oh no we've we've actually shadow banned them they'll just hear a low buzzing noise and that nose will start to bleed which is i guess the the third part of this common ground is that there is an embedded message in here that is fatal to toxic corporations to c-level executives we we create permanent tinnitus in the ears of high-powered execs if they listen to this video not that we would ever do that we don't have the power to do that it's all a joke for now april fools and the best part is this episode is released on the first of

april april fools again i keep on getting you there is no end to the string of jokes apart from of course the end of this episode yeah so thank you for listening stay soul humble and brave in the deserts of your minds good night We'll see you next time. Choose firmer or softer. Adjust cooler to warmer. And right now, save up to $2,500 during our massive Labor Day event. Hurry into your local Sleep Number store today because we have your number.