War With A Mate - Episode 74: A Tale Of Two Buenos

Episode Date: May 1, 2026

It was the best of times, it is the worse of times. The source and solution of the Buenos are tackled in this airborne episode of War With A Mate. With the guys resolving the first air phase of Turn Five, looking to the progenitor of bombing runs in the history segment, and taking criticism of “helpful” suggestions into the stratosphere in this week’s Common Ground. This is most certainly for you.

stop wasting your nights on a mattress that doesn't get you experience the most comfortable mattress in the world the sleep number smart bed at the touch of a button you can personalize your comfort choose firmer or softer adjust cooler to warmer and right now save up to twenty five hundred dollars during our massive labor day event hurry into your local sleep number store today Because we have your number. Hello and welcome to War with a Mate. With me, James. Me, Andy.

Andy, who has 13 fingers and is playing the campaign for North Africa? you me if i had three more fingers in this situation thumbs are fingers do you where do you stand on that wouldn't have been a great riddle of the sphinx no that's from the goblet of fire where harry potter's going through the maze books of course they got rid of the sphinx in the film which makes sense because you don't want a whole sequence in that big cool monster well it's not really a big cool monster when all it kind of does is so it asks a riddle about spiders and it's a really bad riddle and then it resolves in like 30 seconds maybe 60 if you have like dramatic cuts of harry potter going oh what was that again just rubbing

his chin oh what what was it again what doesn't ron like what doesn't he spiders that's it it would have made an already questionable film far worse there's a lot of plot holes to pick apart in that film but we won't do that we've got our own things to pick up campaign for north africa podcast where we are each week we play sbi's campaign for north africa yeah that's what we decided to do with our lives isn't that cool yeah it's better than a harry potter podcast uh yeah i suppose i'd probably i think i enjoy this more than a harry potter podcast because i think i'd just be and this is going to be a fun thing based on what i'm usually like in this i think i'd be angrier during a harry potter podcast yeah no one wants to see that i don't

think i'd maintain my composure particularly well it's not it's not a fun series of books or films for me anymore no it's been tarnished a little just a tad just just a a big tad what hasn't been tarnished is this gem of a game we're of course talking about monopoly no we're not we're doing this we've been doing turn five upstage one and specifically the air missions and my movement yes we've resolved both uh tick them both off today yeah you were generous enough last time to give me first go with your initiative you're welcome i thank you i do actually thank you for this because it went in a direction that i think you were not expecting and i'm always glad when that happens i'm always happy to surprise you i'm looking forward to you doing it one day

you did not see this coming you didn't see this coming shall we talk about what happened we will we'll get to that point and we'll go through the the motions to get there we started off with the prime time air phase we'd left a bit of a cliffhanger last week wherein we declared our missions i had three you had six your six were two combat air patrols over the fourth and the seventh yeah which lined up with two of your bombing missions okay um and then i also strafed two things the supply dump you have up on the coast thank you and also the second and i also bombed the second oh and the fourth no other way around i don't care about the fourth

i care about the second that's up to you no i care deeply about the second i don't care about the fourth anymore they're fascist italians andy like i know you're just defending yourself because you care so much about the fourth i don't i don't care about the four of those guys i don't you keep talking about how cool the fourth are i showed you their cohesion today yeah it's probably the highest in your army fuck you it's it's like a combination of minus sixes nines and elevens yeah i assumed that was the average that's actually incredibly good that's bad sorry it's not good it's not good that's that's very bad for my guys yes that is really bad a lot no no one else i think is that bad they might actually be the worst off okay at a cursory glance they might

be the worst off. I feel like I've made a couple of you guys retreat twice. No. I know you're wrong, but I don't have specific examples to the top of my head. Oh, wow. What a great counter-argument you've presented here. I guess. You've added nothing. It's unnecessary. So we fired off with with my missions my air missions yes we went off strong we started strong we began with me doing my strafe on your supply convoy your truck convoy convoy one yes as not only i like to call them but the counter also demarks them as number one and also my spreadsheets oh perfect i haven't done a weird shift on the truck numbers from the spreadsheets well that's good because what a weird way to confuse things further for you because i don't look at your spreadsheet so that's just

confusing your side of things completely. I strafed them and I missed. You did. So that was a shame. But you gave those guys a little scare for a second. That's not enough though, is it? No, it's not. You don't get any points for

frightening people. Although morale is a big thing, so I imagine there is an aspect of intimidation. Not mechanically. There is a mechanic for disenchantment. no there is it's morale disenchantments i guess they're disenchanted with the cause but it's a weird way of phrasing it well i don't make the rules andy i just read the rules sparingly i hate doing it so i dropped my my strafe missed that i then went after your guys i went after the fourth

and the seventh yes fourth indian and the seventh armored started with the fourth and i committed 14 planes to that. You did, and I commuted 14 to that one. So, one each. SM 79. Or as Rihanna would say, S and M. Oh, is that the type of plane? Well, with Rihanna, it's the name

of one of her songs. A really hit song as well. Is it about Italian bombers? No, I think it's about kinks. Well, I know it's about kinks. I've listened to the music. Sticks and stones may break my bones but getting off most of my bombing load excites me yeah well you got 14 through that one i got like six or something i think you took out five planes in that one yeah that one i got

pretty lucky i think you hit them hard odds yeah yeah your odds were you needed a i think on average it was like a 15 16 on the die yeah and you were you hit that pretty consistently i needed a 12 or lower so I had two potential die results that could land me a kill and I got none didn't shoot down a single one of your planes that's what I'm happy about

I'm unhappy about it but I guess we do have to I have to live with that you don't have to you can choose to quit I'll throw that out occasionally just in case so you ended up taking out

five of my planes and that bomb total started to dwindle because every plane you take out drops 12 bomb points from my repertoire and I had 168. So that does start to impact it. 120 is what I'm left with. So you took out four?

You must have took out four planes. Oh, it must have been four, yeah. It's a 12 each. Yeah, that is it. Yeah, you took out 48 bomb points. Dropped me to 120, which takes me to the next threshold. Yes, you ended up

going down two, just. Yep, don't like that. Which I did roll well on. Yes. 64 is what I rolled on that table. Which resulted in two infantry. Two of them locked down. Locked and loaded. A little pinned. Took them away. Siphoned them off.

Put them in the corner. Fair enough. They are pinned. They are there, that's safe. That was less than what i hoped for because if all my bombs went off that would have been four up to four but with that result it would have been four yes so 64 is four 64 zoo lane good cartoon don't know if you ever saw that you should it's worth your time it's certainly worth my time i thought as much so with that i was then left with the seventh to tackle that went better yes worse planes well you had

better planes for the most part oh yeah actually the blenheims were one better yeah you had much better planes going on with that so i had a plus three instead of a plus two on the other one i just didn't get lucky got one plane you took out one plane and the bombing load there was higher at 16 planes there it didn't knock you down no i stayed quite firmly within that bracket of bombs so when i did drop my bomb load i once again rolled two snake eyes yep that was the first time in all of that air combat that i rolled a result of snake eyes of double ones any other point in that air combat that would have meant i shot down one of your planes instead it meant i got the worst result possible on that table yes so another two of the seventh infantry

uh yes i took out two of their infantry had them suppressed bombed they can't move so they can move they can move up to half of their cpa so yeah they can't move but it's massively reduced them yeah it means they can move five ten well no no five is there it's now their amount that they can move no because they're motorized so they're 20 yeah but if i was you know let's hypothetically pretend i forgot that oh then it would be five yeah so exactly so in this hypothetical world where i forgot that they are motorized they can only move five yeah yeah cool just checking that you now you're on the same wavelength as me man you know no i get it that was my bombing run that was my my total air mission complete and

successfully i would say i managed to pin a bunch of your guys that's what you want it's what i need it's what i need keeping them trapped out there in their trucks dwindling forces i've essentially eradicated a battalion right okay they're gone they're exterminated that's a that's a bizarre way of looking well the way i see it is what are you going to do are you going to leave them behind yes okay i've sent so many guys on suicide missions why did you think i'd not leave 300 guys to die in the desert I don't know because of the climax of the battle

because we're getting towards the end yeah which means I can burn them off at a faster rate right okay yeah I guess that's true you know what I've been doing that so I don't know why I didn't think you would I've got four groups mostly divisions just stood

ready to be killed in the next few upstages is to take a while dying okay that's that's making more sense now okay fair enough well in that case i'll uh continue with bated breath that maybe this was a good idea maybe maybe regardless i've hurt you but you were very happy about that would you like to recap what you did andy uh sure I dropped 270 something bombs on the fourth

Excessive by the way It's way too many It's more than you need to For sure Dropped 260 something on the second Yep Which are the guys I actually care about Yep

Also strafed them Yes you did Killed a tow point of infantry Took out a tow point on coincidentally the same Battalion that you previously strafed I wouldn't say coincidence I would because I mixed them up, it's random selection so if it's not coincidence

you're either psychic or cheating or both yeah that's a good point if you're psychic you are cheating yeah I guess yeah it's one or the other, it's binary if you're playing this game

with me and you're psychic I guess I have a couple of questions why you're still playing this if you're psychic it's not a particularly useful power I'll come and ground that one day because that's insane that's genuinely backwards thinking but alright fine

and you yeah you continued to bomb that wasn't enough for you yeah well I bombed those two and then I did two full strafes on your little supply dump I got 10% of it

and then yeah the one I did on the second where I killed a toe. So yeah, two carp, two bombing, two strafing. Nice little even split. That's a squeaky chair you got there. Sorry. That's going to make it a nightmare to edit this episode. I'll stop shifting around. Stay completely

static. Do not move a muscle or you're going back to the floor. Yeah, I do like it better than the other chair. Really? I'm all upright. Is it because you can shift around though? It is. Does not being able to shift around and make it less of a good chair.

Partially. Yeah, cool. Oil the thing up, WD40 that chair, and you'll be able to spin to your heart's content. Will do, buddy. But you're shifting as we speak. I've found the squeak tolerance. And you think that gives you power over me?

No. That's a quote from The Dark Knight Rises. That's what Guy from Rogue One says to Tom Hardy. I draw in a huge blank on that. It's a really normal, fine, like, 5 out of 10 scene. Okay. Yeah, that film fell off on my expectations.

So, moving away from that, and other films that weirdly coincided in release date with the several Obama administrations, that is a thing. The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises both came out when obama was elected into office oh okay yeah i don't know if that feels like it doesn't mean anything no it's just coincidence but it's it's a fun coincidence it's like when i uh when i go to get on the bus and my phone has no internet connection so i can't show that i have an

a ticket because the app needs internet connection and that weirdly drops when i'm trying to get on the bus it seems like a con i'm not sure who's behind it but somebody probably is big tech and big bus colluding once more it's definitely big bus i just don't know how much big tech are in i don't know if it's a sponsored scam it's hard to tell these days you can't tell what big anything is it's all big it's all too big but what i had after this was big movement i wouldn't use the big i'd say everything's big but this movement was small and dare i say cowardly whoa well what i chose to do for my movement i elected to move the 32nd gaff 32 gaff the tabrook garrison as they were formerly known before i moved them out of tabrook now they're just garrison

gary s as i like to call him you shouldn't i moved them down one hex south that was my land movement for this op stage yeah i don't know what that was about well the thing is andy you did something by giving me my first turn yeah you said that you don't want to go first you want to play off my movement that's true so i thought well let's not do that let's not give you movement to play off. All I've done there is slightly expand the area that you'll have to traverse around desert hexes,

plain hexes, clears, in order to circumvent my troops and get back onto tracks to move to what I presume is Tobruk. You can assume whatever you want. Well, you're either going to Tobruk or you're going to

get stuck in a kill box at Bardia. Or I'm going to Benghazi. You're not going to Benghazi? I might. If you try and get to Benghazi, I can get there so much faster along road that you can't utilise. I can use the road. I just need to get on it. Well, that's, I guess, yes, that is it.

That's how roads work. Well, it's part and parcel, isn't it? Because to get to the road, you have to go past my men. Yeah. The closest point you can get to right now is to go due north, which takes you right next to Bardia. if you move further west going due north takes you to Tobruk which I can get to

if you go even further west you cross onto map B which I can also get to at breakneck speed using the road and then you also not only have to go north to get to the road you have to go further north and you also have to cross weird hexes

where we go into weird stuff like rough and gravel and marsh so that doesn't seem like a smart move. We'll see. It could be a long game that you're playing and then you're hoping I evacuate

a lot of my troops west to try and stop you and then you make some sort of play for Bardia or Tobruk and all I've got are my weakened divisions. Could be, yeah. But the thing is, I would send my weakened divisions there, onto that road, people

that I'm willing to just let die. Okay. And then they're just a rock in the road okay and that's fine by james you can't do anything about it okay i'm all powerful sure thing buddy i've got little hexes on a board or you've got no way to stop me from moving those around apart from applying the rules of the game in a way favorable to you through tactical and i guess just sound logic that's another one yeah so if you employ either of those you have a way to stop me but barring that you have no way to stop me i think this will be an interesting turn i think it will be a very mentally taxing turn for james that's good

it's bad for james yeah good for me yeah that's true yeah you'll yeah if you're andy and i'm james that's that does track jesus you're right but i just i worry that this game might do something bad to my mind i don't think so no probably not only if you let it which you clearly are yeah it's it's it's starting to seep through a tad yeah but that's all right we live and we learn and we have to learn because i've left you with this situation that you need to learn from you need to decide what you're going to do going forward i have decided which is i'm not going to tell you i'm just going to win the game well i'll put it this way you're going to show me next week so you may as well just say it i'm not gonna show you next week then you're cheating again we're

going back to the psychic thing hell yeah i'm not sorry i'm not psychic do you know that what i'm not psych i can't read minds yeah i know it's one of your major failings that actually makes me feel really good about myself why because of one of my major failings is that i don't have a superpower that's by category there's hundreds of thousands of major failures but are they all superhero based like that i don't have like magic no some of them are you just you're like a bad guy some of them yeah so there's multiple major failings where i'm a bad guy yeah there's a whole category in the major failings for major he's a bad guy list two i don't want to dox you on the podcast.

I don't want to go spill your beans. It's crazy that you think you have beans to spill. You know what I've got. I don't. You know exactly what I could say. I've got inklings. Yeah. Isn't my anger towards, I guess,

most of life? Doesn't help. No, that is a catalyst. It's a contributing minor. What the fuck? there's metrics all over the place it looks a bit like a family tree okay well

I'll take that with a pinch of salt and with that pinch of salt I'm going to add an extra bit of spice here Andy salt's not a spice well it is I'm a white British male salt is spice for me

it doesn't have to be but it is because my diet's very very niche it's very it's not niche it's incredibly mainstream i don't think my diet's mainstream it chicken nuggets and salt yeah yeah that's pretty i like what i like i'm sure you do i'm not saying i'm not even trying to stop you liking what you like it's just pretty mainstream it feels like you're trying to discourage it because if i hear i'm doing something mainstream i won't like that if i have to trick you into being healthy i won't i always knew you were a good friend i just didn't know how good yeah until now not very so to add that spice in we're playing the main

game for a meal yes the full game the stakes are whoever wins that that full version of the game wins a meal we're doing the practice run now six turns and at the moment the current situation is i hit a win condition which means i win the stakes for this game which is a kinder bueno we have two turns left there are thereabouts but there is a chance that you can hit a win condition yeah so how about this okay how about a double jeopardy

okay if you hit a win condition after I've now hit my win condition yeah and you can hold that for an upstage I'll get you two kinder buenos okay and I guess if I don't I get you two kinder buenos

yes okay sure because I've recently had a hangering for kinder buenos and I thought this is a way to get two free Kinder Buenos. It's a way to try and get them. It's a way for you to end up paying for two Kinder Buenos

and getting none. Ten Kinder Buenos. Feels like it's a start to an actual amount of money. Yeah, okay, I'll dial that back. We'll go with two. I just saw you say yes and I thought I could probably get some money out of this because if I get you to buy me Kinder Buenos

in bulk, I can sell those on the secondary market. second-hand kinder buenos you'll be surprised go for a lot of money i am surprised well they go for about the same as a first-hand kinder bueno because people don't know that they've passed hands i guess they're all sealed still in the packaging they might have on the package not for individual sale those are usually the ones that are marked up yes yeah corner shops they're also the ones you buy yeah yeah well we we found a vending machine

on our latest trip yes our latest war with a mate company expedition well we have to go and get the kinder winners which is also adding to the price because you have to take a train well i think the train was it was a durham train station don't dox us we don't live in durham but now someone could camp out that vending machine i i guess they could but what a weird thing to do so but yes it was on platform so the the vending machine at durham train station has a kinder bueno in there has our kinder buenos in it so if we find out there's been some sort of crime committed that involves that vending machine and it's an entirely non-violent crime we'll know it was one of you stealing our kinder bueno go full taken on your asses if it was a violent crime i'll

presume that's an unfortunate coincidence and we'll have to delete this episode after the fact we will it's you know it's respectful it's nice it would ruin the whole numbering system that's true well we did release an episode twice once i think that's fixed actually you released an episode twice once yeah you distribute i edit and i'm the special guest every episode yeah and i distribute and take all the money yeah i'm gonna talk to you about that no you don't I should you can talk to my lawyer that the show is paying for that's part of what I need to talk to you about

talk to my lawyer why we have separate legal counsel why we have legal counsel at all look you can't start an enterprise with your friends unless you're willing to screw them over when the time is right are you Zuckerberg what the fuck is this I'm a bit of a zuck

you're a bit of a fuck well I don't want to talk to you anymore Shall we talk to some fans? So we'll do the mailbag Let's whip out the mailbag Let's talk to some people who Unless we've got another Bezos email

Sending us comic strips of cats Then this should be a really nice experience Okay But only time will tell Shall we see? Let's look So delving into that mailbag of ours Yeah, let's see what we've got

We have today's first email By Christine Christine's email is titled the lost documentary about an impossible house hi y'all love the y'all chrissy here watch it chrissy sopranos reference great show normally well it's just your name normally i wait for y'all another y'all love it to read my message before emailing back but i've fallen a little bit behind and just watched a video essay that i felt james and the audience would enjoy titled the lost documentary about an impossible house by sagan hawks on youtube it's a deep dive

into the textual analysis of house of leaves with some amazing visuals i highly recommend it to anybody who's interest who's interested in the book even if you haven't read it yet though it does help you've been watching that video haven't you i have loved that video i when this email came through initially i saw the the subject and had a quick skim through and immediately looked at the video i've been watching the video piecemeal for the last month or so when i've had a bit of spare time and wow incredible if you've i would i would dare say chrissy to contradict you just a tad i would say if you haven't read house of leaves and you don't feel like you can commit to reading house of leaves this is the next best thing this is another medium to digest the book in pretty

much its entirety without having to do so so if you are interested in that don't want to read the book watch that video it is incredible very well put together and captures all the essence of it if you have read the book and you want to explore the book further it breaks it down really well it explores some themes that the book only kind of a lot of the book it sort of touches on and that you fill in the blanks the video holds your hand through parts of it and also even for me and i've read the book like five or six times now it just explores it in more open ways so incredible video incredible book read house of leaves but yes thank you chrissy because that is now up there as one of my favorite video essay style youtube videos of all time it's it's top five very

comfortably and i watch a lot of those things the only one i put above that in terms of house of leave so far is my house dot ward by power pack that was the one that like got you into it that that's how i got it before you read the book yeah i watched that and then then our friend the same one who got us into this game bought me the book so his sort of mission in life is to have me invested in all your time in pieces of media or pop culture parentheses that will take all of my time up but yeah incredible chrissy goes on some of the themes and ideas reminded me of a book i read recently with so very interestingly world built with so very interesting world building called void verse that takes place in a universe unlike our own where humanity survives on rocks

of various sizes falling through a seemingly endless void that sounds cool what i want to check out i think i need to once i get through the other daniel loosky book tom's crossing which i'm still tackling yep i would love to to read that as well i love a good odd universe yeah yeah weird universe i like i like it when i'm i'm reading something that is inherently hard to navigate lindy and pyrenees as well because that's the one that's sort of similar you've mentioned a few that you've read that are like comparable not it's definitely not as like in depth or anything but it's the same sort of weird structure adjacent to our own universe type thing yeah something non-prosaic that you can really sink your teeth into i love that in regards to the recent common

ground with item loans a classic i like this one i suggest you look into library of things an increasingly common service where libraries keep a stock of useful items ranging from lawn cooking and home care equipment but also things like dvd players that's interesting and i think this isn't the first email that's mentioned it yes this does seem to be one which we occasionally have on common ground where we just accidentally invent something that exists and the fun thing about it is with our listener base that is a dare i say niche category of person there's you know it's not a massive listener base we're not uh you know we're not we're not getting in millions every week but it's fun that there is a crossover that we don't have any idea about something but more

than one person will get in touch and go you've missed this thing that a few of us know about yeah so the the hit ratio is is very funny i'm excited to see the end of the bracket mostly friendly practice run i'd say that's getting less and less yeah i i think i swore you a few times today when you hit me with those bombs just a few friendly swear words at you yeah and to see the serious hard hitting tactics yeah uh you bring to the main game or your best approximation there we go i think best approximation more so than and it's funny how best approximation zero and one can be so far away from each other when you look at them i often feel like a citizen of the early 19th century waiting for news from the front to finally reach the other side of the world

that's that's a nice way to put it and the main game i don't think is going to make it any easier you'll have the in-depth analysis week by week but i don't know that it's going to make anything easier or more beneficial you won't feel more clarity chrissy i promise a small suggestion but it may be worth keeping track of which history segments are in which episodes on the website as time goes by and the segments become more interconnected it'll be useful to have a way to go back and listen to your old segments subtly humbly bravely yours chrissy yeah um again i think multiple people have mentioned it and it's something i do need to get around to um should hopefully have more free time coming up project at work finishing so hopefully i can start working

on that soonish yeah your job at nasa yeah when that whole thing wraps up when we get a guy at moon again yeah is that what is the current goal it's the public goal oh i see but there's something else going on are you the one kidnapping and disappearing the scientists because i i hear that that's in the the zeitgeist at the moment getting rid of scientists let's just say the city on the dark side of the moon is bouncing at the i want to go there can we do an ep there if you get good at science if you get worth kidnapping Ah, okay. I've got a ways to go then. Yeah.

I'm barely good at the game. Dare I say I'm bad at the game? I'll allow it. Sustained. The next email comes in from Matthew. Matthew is a very dependable source of info because Matthew is another foe who's playing the game itself. Yes.

I believe a solo run. Yes, but he's been keeping us on the straight and narrow since basically the start. Yes, which has been a godsend. Matthew's really thrown in some great advice and corrections in our fledgling days and this one is titled archaeology yeah uh hi Andy and James when I emailed you guys it's usually about rules it still will be today but also on a common ground you did sometime last year I'm sorry to break it to you James but I don't think you won the scenario as the win conditions

only count at the end of six turns so someone only wins after the six turns and the win conditions are met. So Andy, I think he'll probably win. Well, first of all, Matthew, you don't know anything about Andy. Andy's a buffoon of sorts.

An incompetent, mischievous, devilish fiend. Which really, what does that say about you? As I started to say that as well, I was realising... The more I insult him on yeah well it was more the case of i've described characteristics of usually a cunning foe so that's that's bad news for me what i'll say to that matthew is um yes uh in in that i

think andy will win and also the fact that we we couldn't find any definitions at the time as to whether or not you need to hold it until the end of the scenario so we kind of went fast and loose with it as we have to in these situations and we came to accept it's unlikely that another win condition will be met within the scenario so we're going off that however as we've discussed earlier today if andy is to break free from the reins of my current victory then we will double down and he gets double points or if i manage to hold it i'll get double points so yes you are right as we've come to learn because you're not the only person who sent this other people have also mentioned that this is a loose interpretation of the wind conditions yes but i think i mean at

least acknowledging that one was met yes we found that don't hit one i guess you did have one i think it's fair to say that's the like tiebreaker yeah it gave us a nice climax for partway through and at the time it was also our empirical understanding of the rule yeah but now that we've had the clarity it means we know for i will never do this again in the practice scenario but we know at least going forward what it means and i i do think andy has a good chance at trying to win this still if we're going off that same principle of holding holding it for an upstage yeah so we'll we'll see how it pans out but thank you as always matthew for for filling us in on the blanks because you and others have pointed out this mishap yeah uh then uh for the

other thing remember when you guys did a common ground on building fake things for archaeologists well there was a rough uh round recently built in the city where i live where the guy moving the boulders as the ground is very rocky using a digger stack the rocks in almost physics defying ways every time i drive past them i like to wonder what people will think when they see them in the future it'll look uh like so it'll look like stonehenge thing with stacks of rocks in two straight lines going on for like two kilometers and on the roundabouts in zimbabwe uh they work better than traffic lights uh as we usually only have electricity during elections or if you live near a minister and when they do work everyone ignores them finally i'm a bit of

a nerd when it comes to military equipment so if you want i can write a little summary on all the military equipment used uh in the north africa campaign and compare their capabilities thanks for continuing your very enjoyable podcast a subtle subtle humble and brave matthew well first of all matthew um thank you for sticking with us for so long you've been a mainstay from very early on the i'm gonna look at some pictures of this two kilometer line of stones after this as well that sounds very cool well that's a there's a there's a few cool little snippets in here that matthew's just kind of like thrown in there as like little side pieces yeah which i've really latched onto there which is that only having electricity on during elections that's very

interesting yeah that's a or if you live near a minister yeah like that's that's a weird thing where it's yeah if you're in like localized areas you have electricity but the fact that you can just have it toggled so they've got the infrastructure they i presume just don't have the the fuel to keep everything going constantly but it's like elections coming up it's sort of like a like when you have like you know like decorations on and like the the city center where we live like at christmas or something or and things go we've got some elections coming up in this country for like local elections and everyone's got the like vote whatever party on the door on the like window posters and yeah like but instead of like seeing

posters around you're like oh the lights are on there must be an election coming up that's an interesting idea as well that traffic lights are only functional during an election yeah i feel like you should put your traffic lights on like a separate grid you're gonna not have your grid on all the time but i i don't know yeah it's an interesting thing to focus on during election time it's road safety well it's just everything that electricity like enables yeah like so much yeah it's a it's a wild thing that also interests me that matthew's listening in to the podcast in possibly an area that doesn't have reliable electricity oh yeah yeah yeah and that also matthew it explains a lot if you don't have access to electricity a lot it explains why

you're playing this game there is a good one for a solo run campaign for north africa in a blackout essentially is making a lot more sense yeah i feel like i've got a little insight into matthew's life now do you think the house prices are in like spikes around a minister because they get they have to be that's they also i assume they live in nicer areas but also like you want to find where the minister lives so you can be in his electricity aura you want to you want to drain from the minister yeah that is that is an interesting little side of things when it comes to equipment and its comparable capability i mean matthew will not commission anything that feels like it's a gargantuan task yeah but if you do end up happening to do that we'll happily look

at that we yeah we love seeing stuff like that where people have done all sorts of deep dives between the game itself what we're doing what they found so if if you happen to you will love it but do not go out of your way to do this unless you're already bored and doing it yeah and i will say uh some people have done similar like arrow for instance um who's probably wondering when i'm gonna get to what they sent me uh very sorry about that uh things keep coming up the structure's pretty loose in terms of what I find interesting. But the stuff you certainly will be used

before the end of the scenario, I do promise that. We hyper-fix it and usually it's on the game, thankfully. But sometimes I find out about the Ottomans and that's three weeks that I wasn't planning on doing. Yeah, it's part of the restructure after the scenario

wraps up where we're reshuffling, rebranding. We're going to change it all up so not too much though no no we'll keep the core of it

we'll keep the core of it it's not going to become a completely different show yeah I mean in a sense it will because it'll be organised and that is completely different it should become a better show

yes but thank you for the emails Matthew and Chrissy anyone who wants to send anything in the email address is info at warwithamate.co.uk the website is

warwithamate.co.uk and the Instagram is just warwithamate we'll take messages from any of those and we'll read everything out at some point we've got 50 years to do the damn thing and we also have fun reminder our first live show which is at the uk games expo in birmingham 30th of may half four if you've got tickets to the games expo it's free please come

we we've had emails coming we've had a few people yeah people have mentioned that they are coming if anyone else is coming along get in touch with us let us know we're going to see what we can about having a bit of a brucey bonus for those that are coming along who are already aware of the show so if you let us know in advance we can have said brucey bonus ready for you and also we'll look at doing a bit of a you know meet and greet conversation bit afterwards if you want to have a chin wag with us let us know because we are just going to be at the expo it looks like like the friday saturday we'll be there friday saturday so if you if you're around for the weekend let us know and we'd love to have a chat with some of you guys um learn a bit more about

the board games going on we're kind of fixed in the one thing that is something i'm excited about is like there's this whole world of board games that way on the fringe i know monopoly and dnd and then the campaign for north africa and nothing in between like the mainstream and the The total outlier. So, yeah, we'd love to just chat with a few of you guys and find out what's going on. So let us know, or maybe we'll see you there. That is it for the listener mail.

Yes. The mail bag is done for today, but it's stocked up quite nicely at the moment. We'll get around to everything, but you guys are firing in some great stuff, so thank you for that. So if we're moving away from the here and now, We have to go to the there and then.

Yes. That's the past. We're going back. And that's your domain, Andy. So take us away. The men of the long-range desert patrols were quite a sight on their return to Cairo from a most trip to Libya.

The contrast between the east and west of the Nile is very marked. In the east, the country... At this point, I gave little thought to my past but had always been interested in boats in the sea. I am more or less in a position of a campus surprise where I had a telegram which is on the point of sinking

because errors are present we are absolutely not qualified to share views on history when and where are you taking us to I'm taking you back to Libya that's where I just was a bit of Italy that's further away

so the Italian government therefore finding itself forced to safeguard its dignity and its interests has decided to proceed to the military occupation of tripoli and serenica this solution is the only one which italy can accept that's from giovanni giolotti italian prime minister at the time second longest running prime minister italy ever had okay so this guy is uh he's really had a seat for a long time yeah it's something like 1890 to 19 like late 90s to mid 20s it's like 25 years wow good span then yeah but the only other guy who's had more is mussolini oh yeah wasn't yeah that's not put him in there as an actual elected official yeah so

we've had a brief run through victor emmanuel the third and also the altmans which brings us to the italo-turkish war italian politicians had been talking up and proposing the war since 1908 as a likely option this kicked into a higher gear in march of 1911 the papers talked of a land rich with minerals and water likely defended by 4 000 ottoman troops claiming it would be a quote military walk just like yeah they also spoke of having to protect the small italian population emigrated there from the locals this is about a thousand italians living in a land with 1.5 to 2.5 million inhabitants that's the ratio on that's an interesting one yeah they also believed for some reason that the local population was desperate to rise up against the ottomans and would warmly

welcome them and fight with them cool so they're deluded yeah they had a proper ganda initiative spinning libya as a paradise that rightfully belonged to the italians well yeah they had a lot of propaganda and this is one of the weirder ones yeah it's also pushing that roman argument that mussolini will rely on more later where it's like they're they kind of go we're claiming the heritage of the romans and the romans owned all this but also libya was the only country in the region owned by the romans at this time that wasn't owned by a western power or the it's the only easy target yeah they're not going for the the risky ones yeah they're not conquering britain and gaul and stuff there is also strong opposition inside italy as well though

in particularly from socialists such as the rising fire brand benito mussolini oh there he is who said the following quotes about this war i just find this fascinating from where he says here to what he will become in like less than 20 years oh don't tell me he's a hypocrite he might be a hypocrite uh for us the national flag is a rag to be planted on a dunghill there are only two fatherlands in the world that of the exploited and that of the exploiters militarism here is the monstrous leech that is incessantly sucking the blood of the people the army is now a highly organized school of crime and exists only to protect bourgeois capital and profits and let a single cry rise from the multitudes of the proletariat and let it be

repeated in squares and streets of italy down with war which i just think are very interesting things for him to be like writing and saying incredibly andy wall sentiments for a guy who will launch a war this war actually um has a lot of i personally thought it had a lot of similarities to ethiopia in some ways which is the italians are fighting an ambitious colonial war that will be one of the building blocks leading up to this leads up to world war one ethiopia led up to world war two so and they're at like similar points and they're like this is 1911 and then the ethiopia was like also just before he's like a really shit silver surfer where he's a herald of great destruction yeah but it's it it's italy in a way it's like if italy ever get

any colonial ambitions the world war is coming okay i'll keep an eye on the news for that yeah Mussolini also organized a general strike and protest to stop uh trains leaving for really uh where he lived uh for uh the war with supplies so he's like actively organizing against it and for this he's charged with sedition and inciting rebellion and sentenced to a year in prison uh which really boss bolsters his reputation with italian socialists and when he gets out he's given the appointed as editor for the officialist so official socialist newspaper avanti which also makes him a national celebrity yeah his like celebrity i think a lot of the celebrity statuses amongst the war have really confused my perception of what the war looked like across the globe yeah

i think it's mussolini is maybe a proto-influencer like yeah well it's sort of you know it's in a way kind of trump vibes where you've got this figure who is a celebrity who goes into politics celebrity politician is something that seemed so new when it started to happen over the last 15 or so years but it's not new no it's not it's just trans it's finally translated to the social media age yeah but it was definitely a thing oh yeah i think it was sort of a bell curve probably you had that well i guess reverse bell curve where you had these celebrity politicians you've got these figures in history and then you had this sort of boring period but then you have even in the uk you've got figures like you know thatcher

where you've got these yeah huge landmark figures and politicians and and and culture yeah and now it's swung around to the the extreme again where it's like this person is not only a powerful figure but it's all anyone talks about yeah just an interesting thing with mussolini we'll get to him he's gonna have his own series but it's gonna be a probably a long in-depth one because he is a he is an interesting character from history i'm interested for the lusolini series yeah but despite the socialists protesting uh the war would go on the italians sent a message to the ottomans demanding an answer in 24 hours and the letter was basically you have 24 hours to cede libya to us and the ottomans replied they received the letter on

the 28th of september and replied like basically immediately saying they're open to negotiating but are not immediately accepting the terms italy declares war in response of course despite initiating the war the italian army is characteristically unready having only been told about the invasion in late september it starts in september so they have like 10 days notice at most the maps they have are going some of them are relying on roman sources like from like caesar and like when they owned that region and so they're like two thousand year old using a two thousand year old map and like accounts from roman generals about the terrain and stuff i know i know time has changed more rapidly in the last hundred or so years yeah but

the idea of using the campaign for north africa map to plan a trip in egypt in the year four in the year 4000 well i'm talking about now yeah now it would be insane yeah in the year 4000 and again i know things will evolve more rapidly now yeah but no no it's stupid it's so dumb they also receive orders to integrate planes into the army on the 28th of september okay so so they got a day to figure that leaving that real last minute and this is we'll get to it but This is an insanely short turnaround for something that is very new. But they arrive off the coast on the 3rd of October and start bombarding Tripoli with their ships for two days

before moving in on the 5th, where 1,500 soldiers disembark and take Tripoli. The Ottomans don't have an answer for these naval guns, so they've just retreated in good order inland to fight the war from better terrain. But the Italians take this as, like, there's no resistance here. this is a great victory for us the rest of this is going to be easy

and so their army starts disembarking on the 10th of October with no training for amphibious landing so it's just a fucking mess and it's also one of the first and they're just like figuring it out on the fly with no training

they believed a force of 20,000 would be able to take over Libya as they believed the locals would be on their side and there were only 4,000 Ottomans instead the 8 000 ottoman regulars allied with 20 000 local troops mainly from the sensu order who were familiar with the desert and had been fighting tribal uh wars for basically their whole lives so it's not 4 000 guys it's 28 000 guys who know the terrain and are hardened soldiers which historically does not go down well no go to an environment where the native people

know the environment a lot better you send in people naively yeah to the terrain they are butchered yeah especially when it's a desert there's an extra element here yeah the environment alone can kill you yeah so despite this the italian forces managed to capture triply tabruk dirna benghazi and homs between the 3rd and 21st of october 1911 but they're confined very closely to the coast and like a narrow strip like they would basically be on the road and no further south to give a sense of they have not conquered libya no no they haven't no but we'll get to the rest of that campaign uh but we're going to step away for a minute because this is an interesting war because it uh includes a lot of thirsts uh in particular thirsts in relation to flight

something to keep in mind here i think is um the first flight of the wright brothers was made only eight years before this and it lasted 12 seconds and it only went 120 meters and that was eight years before that that's december 1903 wow that is yeah i'm trying to think of other industries where you go eight years down the line and then stop relying on it for like warfare yeah i mean look at ai if you were to take ai moves at a different pace but if you took that from its sort of inception as what ai is currently known as yeah from whatever that start point was to 80 years later implementing that into something so vital as warfare yeah that's so risky the straight the rate of change as well it's crazy

yeah like that's why it's so mad they gave them a day to integrate their air force because on the 23rd of october 1911 ricardo moise took the first ever strategic reconnaissance flight that's such a new concept to introduce yeah and it was actually quite successful he flew along the coast and found and followed a group of 2 000 ottomans who i imagine were like what the fuck just looking up in the sky like what is going on i guess you do have the element of surprise yeah i guess you might they might be like i've heard of these planes is that like they're not common it's such a new thing to introduce and to to then see it in action yeah yeah he also managed to discover that the town of azizia was 60 kilometers from tripoli their maps claimed it was eight just to give you

a sense of how bad their geographical information oh my god no that's 52 kilometers through desert that they wouldn't have accounted for if they were trying to go to that town like that's dangerous yeah that's insane yeah ricardo also has another i guess more dubious first as on a later flight he had mechanical failures and went down behind enemy lines becoming the first airman ever to become a pow oh wow yeah so yeah this this guy is a very unique he's got two firsts in the history of war which is pretty yeah this guy's ticking off all the boxes he can his bingo cards looking pretty full at this point and there's another first year um after the first reconnaissance flight uh by about a week that will change the nature of war forever uh so let's read some of

Lieutenant Giulio Gaviotti's mail. This is a letter he wrote to his father, some snippets from it. Feels bad reading his mail. Yeah, I think it's fine. He's probably been dead for a while. Oh, I see, that's the rule. Today I have decided to try to throw bombs from the aeroplane.

It is the first time that we will try this, and if I succeed, I will be really pleased to be the first person to do it. there's something so so quaint about that yeah he's so proud about his little experiment little does he know what would come of this yeah uh today two full boxes of bombs arrived we were expected to throw them from our planes it is very strange that none of us have been told about this. So they were given no warning?

And that we haven't received any instructions from our superiors. We're taking the bombs on board with great precaution. It will be interesting to try them on the Turks. This guy's been thrown completely in the deep end. Yeah.

As soon as the weather is clear, I head to the camp to take my plane out. Near the seat, I have fixed a little leather case with padding inside i have laid the bombs in it very carefully they're small round bombs weighing about a kilo and a half each i put three in the case and i put the other one in the front pocket of my jacket he's giving such detail yeah there's a little excursion oh i i thought this is a great layer after a while i noticed dark shape or the dark shape of the oasis with one hand i hold the steering wheel with the other i take out one of the bombs and put it in my lap i'm ready the oasis

is about a kilometer away i can see the arab tents very well i take the bomb with my right hand pull out the security tag which he did with his mouth uh it doesn't mention in the letter but yeah and throw the bomb out avoiding the wing so he's leaning out of his plane with a bomb in his hand He's doing a drive-by. Driving with one hand and trying to miss the wing as he, like, skips a bomb. In the 80s and 90s, he's holding a Mac-11 in one hand. I can see it falling through the sky for a couple of seconds

and then it disappears, and after a while, I can see a small dark cloud in the middle of the encampment. I have hit the target! As if he's bloody hit as well. I then send two other bombs with less success. i still have one left which i decide to launch later on an oasis close to tripoli i come back really pleased with the result i go to a straight to report to the general everyone is satisfied and that is the first aerial bombing from a heavier than air aircraft in history wow and

it's so well documented yeah we do a bit of charm like a bit of like almost innocence that is a weird thing it it does like track as if it is like it's like you know people who have labrador energy yes it is and then i did this and then and then this is what i did and we were happy i hoped it would be good and i did it oh the guy did it he pulled it off yeah and what a what a door he opened oh yeah well after this and further missions the ottoman empire issues a protest the droppings of bomb from balloons had been outlawed by the hay convention of 1899 but it really argued that the ban didn't extend to heavier than air aircraft which i also think is an interesting like if that had gone another way and people have gotten bored with it like how

much damage bombing has done yeah in the century since if like if that had gone into the geneva convention how different would war look well i mean if you think about the the long-lasting effect of that if it was the case that aerial bombardment had been outlawed then you'd be looking at no yeah no airstrikes no no napalm no drones agent orange no no nukes yeah yeah yeah that's that's an insane change to warfare and i think just the world landscape as we know it i think if it was stuck with you know boots on the ground man to man yeah artillery it would be yeah completely different world but this this guy has opened up the door to something completely different yeah it is a sort of remarkable like he's the first guy through this door but this is

like probably comfortably over a million people have died since then from aerial and what year was this oh three 1911 this was 11 yeah 1911 yeah and it's the plane was invented in 1903 yes yes that's what i'm thinking of yeah so 1911 and then you've got a a short you know skipping a jump of 30-odd years and then a nuclear weapon is dropped from a plane. Yeah, I think it's 42 years. 42?

It was dropped in 45? That would take me to 50, yeah. Yeah, so 11, so 34. Oh, sorry, you're saying from 11. Yeah. Oh, sorry, I was going from 03, but yeah. From the first bomb being dropped from a plane. To a nuke being dropped.

34 years from a little handheld bomb being dropped from a plane while he's driving with the other hand to a device that flattens most of a city yeah that is a that's a scary jump when you bear in mind how much

time has passed from that nuke being dropped to now we're nearing 100 years realistically yeah so one more first for this war no sorry one more first for him because as well as doing the first bombing

mission ever he also performs the first ever night mission with a heavier than air aircraft so he's got the first bombing right on the first night mission that night mission must have been nightmare fuel yeah because again it's like you're the first like there's no like well at least i know a couple of people like it's dangerous but people have come back from this yeah you don't know how viable this is yeah this could be a completely undoable thing yeah it could be the case that flying a plane at night doesn't work you can't navigate you will fly into the med or the great desert like because also flying in libya you've got not a lot of you've got mediterranean about

10 kilometers of like civilization near the road and then the desert and there's like people living there but the chances of like you fall into like the great sand sea and you hope someone comes across you and in 1911 i don't know what the light pollution was like to be able to determine where a civilization is and landing the plane and you can't exactly whip out your star charts like you're on a boat

going three miles an hour you're bombing it through the sky and if you're trying to navigate you just have to do it on vibes and you're like oh is that an air is that an airstrip they've lit up to either side so I know where to come in or like

a residential street with streetlights Are we in Zimbabwe and there's an election on? Like, it's hard to say. Yeah, and also in this war, the Italians will have the honour of having the first ever aircraft shot down. Oh, brilliant. Yes.

Also, that's interesting. What the fuck are they shooting them down with? Rifles. I think in particular, Mausers. Oh. Flimsy plane, then. Yeah. Well, yeah.

They're made of wood and cloth. because this is all biplanes well yeah yeah these aren't like you know spitfires um so yeah we'll do more of the tallow turkish war next time but i thought let's do some of the firsts wow in terms of firsts that is some groundbreaking stuff yeah it's also that's not how i thought that would have went but also what did i think it would have went like i do know what you mean where it's like you kind of picture it as like oh it's going to be this huge thing but it's like

they don't actually even know if that bommie fruit caused any casualties or just like hit a guy's tent but he was like not at the tent. The confusion on their part because you're not going to have like loud turbines from that plane No, they fly

fairly low like 600 metres you might get a bit but also like five years later not five years later 20 odd years later when they're fighting the war here like we've watched like SAS Rogue Heroes they're like they know the from of an engine

yeah they hear it and they immediately like go because they've been conditioned but at that point it's such a new concept and it's the first bomb ever to be dropped from a plane yeah you might know what a plane is you might be like oh there's a plane but

you're not expecting anything to come out of it yeah it's like oh they're flying around maybe they're gonna land here yeah and then an explosion blows up beside you yeah and it's like well the plane went over us that has to be the plane surely yeah well it's just the weirdest coincidence ever and it's like well how did they do that little do they know it's a guy one hand on the wheel yeah on the other one he's like stumbling about he's got it in his lap pulls it out throws it over the side trying not to hit the wing as he said yeah but it's also just like

the they didn't tell us about this we didn't train with it they just sent bombs to our airfield and I guess we're hoping maybe one of them will try do you want to throw one out the plane I guess mid air

there's also the thing of he has three and they fit in the pouch just take three why put the one in your shirt you got the extra one yeah what do you want to make sure you want to have the extra one there yeah but by the sounds of it it was wasteful because the other ones didn't land on the target but the first one did yeah he's a he's a pioneer of warfare yeah he is you know that scene in oppenheimer at the end where he talks about having set off this chain reaction to destroy the world

the prequel will be this guy well it's not the same because like it would have just happened if this someone would have done it first but no no well this guy like legacy of this guy is more deaths than the legacy of yeah if you go back to the but i guess if that's the case you go back to the wright brothers yeah those those dastardly they land the plane after those first 12 or so seconds and they just have that same moment of i think we've started a chain reaction that will destroy the world but it cuts to nuclear warheads yeah it cuts to easy jet making a cheap book drones it's all downhill from that you get you get auditors on like industrial sites in the uk audit youtubers oh yeah but they're flying their drones over areas and having arguments

for security i think you'll find i'm allowed to fly my drone i think we've caused a chain reaction that will destroy social media and give wasteful people something to do with their time what a journey he went on what a journey we went on yeah that's a trip to the past that i won't forget that first bombing run i feel like i was there such a descriptive nature within those little parables that he put together yeah that was also i don't think i mentioned it that is a letter to his dad yeah yeah you said at the start that's it's a fun thing from that's a fun bit of mail to receive hello dad what the fuck what's he doing what's a plane how do i conceptualize any of this

you've killed someone from a distance that's never been done before i think in terms of like range is that the furthest kill that would have happened no it was only like 600 meters they didn't have that much altitude so like naval guns were like a couple of k at that point that's a good point yeah you've got artillery yeah i think it takes a while before planes outdo artillery yeah but even then yeah yeah you're looking yeah at least he's not got that yeah at least he can sleep easy fucking 50 or so years ago when he died yeah i don't know i you didn't have anything else notable other than, well,

the first, I didn't have anything else notable other than two firsts in the history of war. Well, Andy, we're going to have a first. Yeah? Finish in the game. Yeah, we'll get into that. I wonder what our weird second one will be. No, we'll just do

one. We'll do one first. But both those guys did two. Well, if we're ever going to get to this first first, we need to actually stick it out the whole hog yes and to stick it out the whole hog we're going to have to both be in the room together for the rest of this play time and not dying is problem one because it's a long time and we're not really healthy people no and problem two is how do we not kill each other

before that that's the more immediate problem well it's the problem i'm going to do things about and to do something about that we have a solution we do as patchwork as it may be And that is Common Ground. 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 it.

Maybe. Yeah. So, Andy, let me hear what your idea is for us to come together this week what will we agree on they need to stop having software just help you based on like assumptions you know where it's like we think you mean this so we'll just do it and it's like i actually didn't so you're not a fan of clippy i actually this is gonna sound weird clippy is actually a better implementation because it asks you questions and that's what you want to do it was like a

too early on like an ai helper i'm talking about like like you know if you're in like say excel and like you try to drag columns down and it'll just randomly guess i wrote this before today yeah that's yeah you say that i gave you a look there because there was a moment earlier about it earlier today yeah we had a moment earlier where you were trying to shift some of your was it your aircraft yeah and it auto filled only part of what you were trying to auto fill it filled in the part you weren't trying to do i dragged like the row i just wanted it to copy the row but it iterate because it was the mark one of a plane it did made it like mark two three four five but then also didn't iterate the numbers in the column i was like what was going on here like and that's a

i guess that's a slightly because excel the thing is with excel it's sort of a case of what you put into it you'll get where it's designed it's formulated it's designed to act on input but you sometimes have to like be like no i don't want you to like oh we think this column is like a currency and it's like no it's not it's just like decimal numbers or something i i agree on that um i'm gonna ask some probing mainly on excel but it's other times as well where it's like oh we're just gonna like do something because we think it'll help you and it just doesn't i'll i'll probe a bit then so how do you feel and this is sort of taking it very much back to basics how do you feel about copy and paste good so when it comes to copy and paste you know

you've got the the typical copy and paste yeah why you just you hit the shortcut whack out your old control v or you right click and go for paste without formatting yes are you fine with it pasting with formatting as the the general rule yes my issue is i think i'm like explaining this badly my issue is there's like it feels like this software where it'll go like we're gonna try and figure out whether you want it formatted or not formatted and do it for you immediately. I don't want to do something and then have it have different results based on what the software thinks I want.

So if it's copy and paste and it just copies formatted every time, then you can do the unformatted. That's good. Yeah. I don't want it to try and guess. Okay. i want to always have i want it to be like deterministic i don't want i don't want that to be like a probability net on like basic commands and shit because they also don't

get it right often enough and if it's not going to be right 100 i just rather it wasn't there this sounds a bit like you hate sales people um i mean a bit but not i don't know where you've got that from this i hate sales people okay so you know when you've got like a you know you you've got a day in the week just a normal day and someone tries to sell you something and this can be you're in a shop you're i've never had a cold call i've never had a cold call of someone trying to sell me something like you know cold calling i don't think i'm important enough to have a cold call sales code i've had emails like the scam ones but yeah if anything i'd feel quite honored to have a cold call yeah a bit of a tangent but i'd

love that if someone called me up and they said i know they just gave my full name um i'll give my address next uh you know if someone calls up hello james of war with a mate i'd love to i'd love to you know chat to you about this thing yeah i'd feel quite honored okay but i imagine there's also a point where that is uh a frustration yeah it's too much because it's you know it's going to be for the most part drivel yeah they're selling you something it's probably not going to benefit you i think it falls into that same almost instinct at this point it's not quite evolved but it is very clearly learned it's in the zeitgeist it's in the the osmosis of the world we live in now where you just pick up on you know something's off yes and i think that's where it

started if we're going back to the origin of this as a problem that's where it began it's like a sales thing it began with that i it began with that and now it's become because what you've got now is you've got technology that is doing this but it's it's the next layer of it because they've sold the technology but the technology is doing that for them i agree it's a sales problem but i think it's a different from what you're saying it it's in at least my take on what it is like why sales causes what i'm talking about potentially okay is they need something new to sell which means they need to add new features to stuff constantly i think that's whereas it's almost like i feel like a lot of this stuff like excel word google drops like you know those like

sort of mainstay kind of applications yes they're just fine but they need to similar to like a fifa almost they need to be like we have new features so they bloat it with like bullshit basically that you don't want where the like core lean thing would have just done night what you wanted for 99 of people yeah they like ruin it to accommodate like very niche things which is i think what they've done they sell the product with the expectation or the promise that this will fulfill your customers buy this from us and you will fulfill your customers and it's also like and then the end product new features yeah and it's like the fact that new features is more important than what the features are yeah the end product is oh this feature will help people

and then it gets to the consumer yourself in this case and it's a case of well no it's not helping me this is a problem but you can't feed that back to the salesperson no you can feed it back to the company and at that point they've bought it so they will peddle it oh i see what you mean and they will tell you no this is a feature this will work because if it doesn't work then we've bought something that's a bum product yeah so not sales and like it's like purchasing yes it started as that and i think it's it's devolved and now you're getting the second hand result of that yeah they've sold it but now they can distribute that on a different level because of the way technology works the technology can be sold they don't have to do the cold call to you you don't have to be

the guy taking the call to buy the bullshit yeah the company did that for them and now you have to suffer it because of automation so with that automation comes well this is a cool feature and it's it's not because how much of this is developed in-house on mass i imagine not a lot of it i imagine a lot of the stuff you run into has been developed mostly elsewhere oh it's all like the things i have issues with are like the third like not third party but like yeah like software you've got no control over but like you have to use and it makes you wonder at what point they've decided to implement this yeah what who called for this who demanded it yeah i guess it's it's not necessarily just the i don't want the software to try and help me i don't want

you to do anything that's not i never want to put a command in and not be sure of the result what like what examples do you have that really stand out because with with my common ground i find that there's usually a single personal anecdote that really fucks me off is there anything that stands out for you with this or is this is something that you've you've struggled with for a longer period I think it's a general annoyance but it's all like AI is a good example of it and the fact

of like you can ask AI the same question like an AI chatbot the same question twice in a row and you will get different and you will get different answers and like I I don't I don't like that there's

seemingly as we've made things more advanced we've added more chance yes that's weird like yeah do you know do you kind of get what i mean now like i phrased it through the like helping thing because it tends to be how it's framed but it's like if i drag this column down it's going to do two different things two different times depending on the data in it or like which cells i like i don't mind if it's if it's the same issue that i can kind of navigate around and it becomes a workaround yeah that's fine because you just

build it into your well that's why i went with the copy and paste situation where if you're if you're aware of it and you know this is the way you can do it or you've got the alternative you can you can control v or you can paste without formatting yeah and that's okay but if it's if it's a chance if it's this sounds like maybe an ai thing then but it feels like something that has come in and not like wanting to help it's coming in with ai and it also feels like something that's going to get bigger and bigger oh it will where we've talked like i've seen people talking about like oh um you can have like probabilistic rendering on games using ai but then the problem is oh so the game's going to render that same scene differently every time someone like goes

to it yeah that's actually a really bad thing sometimes you don't need the advanced shit in there because with that you've got there's two sides to it and i see both but one of them is executed too badly for it to work yeah where the idea of variability a unique experience each time is cool on paper the idea of going through an experience and it being different each time like uh like replayability in a video game if you're taking that as an example and i'm going through if if we did campaign for north africa and each time it would you know let's say we can play it more than once yeah each time we go through and it generates different terrain a new unit appear that is an interesting replay feature if it can still be if it doesn't right

somehow historically accurate i picked the wrong game for this yeah but in the majority of times if it's like you say a cut scene if you're playing a game uh you know or just a story driven thing where it's like oh like there's been some like artistry on the like building even if it's just like a narrow fairly short single player game yeah but like people have put effort into that well that's it that's that's the other side of it where you've got a unique replayability is cool but the other side of it is there was something designed here yeah what are you stripping away from that if it is just kind of multiplayer slosh and you're playing something that you're going to play every day and it's just the same environment it's like a roguelike or like

buying like a game where you know it's randomized yeah like a lot of roguelikes as an example because you like are meant to die and replay where it'll like regenerate that's fine but i wouldn't want to play like cyberpunk and then like open a door and it's a different corridor than it was on my like last well yeah some games are more fun when you replay them over and over and it's the same environment and you learn from the environment and you can adjust to it a lot of rpgs morrowind is a great game great example of that as well that is a very stylized game and part of the fun of that game is because you don't get it's you compare that to the later elder scrolls games and a lot of the fun in that is you learn the environments through repetition yeah and having

to walk to places go through the same area over and over when i've played that the fun in that is becoming familiar with the environment through a sort of learned experience and you also start to be like okay you do the first town and then you go then you go north and then right and the guy falls out the sky yes and then you three scrolls of icari flight love that guy and then you use them in you use one of them in the dungeon that's further along the road to like bypass something and get like a bunch of high level you know the dungeon i'm talking about yes i do yeah but like that's awesome because it rewards like exploration that's what you want from that kind of game i also love that we've we've both

never talked to each other about Morrowind before Not really, I think we both said we enjoy it but we've not gone deep on Morrowind But we both have the same play style You walked that route I just mentioned Yes, we have the same start point for the game You spawn, you do that same thing So

That's the familiarity point But yeah, I just It's the inconsistency It's not inconsistency because someone's fucked up or it's like a bug That's kind of fine well it's because you've added inconsistency in an attempt to mind read me and you're just not

gonna do it like not mind read but you know like you're trying to anticipate my well it's it's a bit like predictive text or actually you a good example of this actually is um if you buy like a one-off thing on amazon oh yes and it goes i'm gonna try and help you by sending i recently brought this tv stand uh i don't know why i tapped it like the listeners because i recently brought a tv stand so i literally every one or two days for the last like three weeks it's been like looks like you're onto something how about another tv stand how many do you think i fucking want do that like and it just feels that's a good example of like none of these algorithms are helpful so let's maybe not use them so much yeah and i don't know if i'm if i'm just cynical or

set in my ways or if i'm just like adverse to like because i don't like when people approach me in a shop and ask if i want any help i because that's why i hate being going to america like to i've got family in america you go visit them you're just trying to like look around the store and you feel like you're trying to at least to me it feels like they're trying to move you on because like can we help you and if someone was doing that in britain i'd be like oh so they're like the thing i'm shoplifting yeah they need they want me out the shop the thing i'm trying here to steal shit in the uk if someone comes over to you and it's just like in a in like in like a a typical supermarket you don't get people in the uk at least any experience i've had where

someone comes over and sort of prompts for help i guess yeah well why don't preemptively help me if i need help and i ask for it please help me but don't come in and like yeah don't don't jump in on me yeah because i don't like the idea of of you being sort of accosted and that's what i feel like and to go back to that point i i don't know if it's my i get confused by it and i think maybe this is part of where you're coming from if i've ordered something recently we ordered a camera for yeah for our project overall we've got some stuff that involves a camera coming up and i bought a camera and now i'm getting suggestions i get an amazon notification every few days that says we think you'd like a new camera and it makes me think well what the

fuck's wrong with the last one you sold me but it also makes me go surely the surely the the thing you would do is go he's bought a camera the next things you go are do you want a tripod do you want a lens do you want to learn when you're buying it they're like people buy these together yes why aren't they doing that why is that not the suggestion yeah like that yeah instead of the saying we think you'd like a new camera and it makes me the first reaction is have you sold me a bum camera it is a sort of like oh do you want to replace that like yeah i'm like do you think i've realized this one's bad because i bought the last one from you why would i trust this one and i've never and this is not hyperbolic i've never once had a suggestion come up from an

advert or from a uh a pop-up suggestion or never bought anything from a notification on amazon that is said anything an advert anything like that i can't remember a time where i've been suggested by an advert or technology in general where it said would you like to buy this and i went that's a fucking great idea i'm gonna buy that right now or in the future i've never had a moment that i can recall where i've done that certainly not if there's like suggestions on amazon i'm sure there are adverts that i've like gradually taken in subconscious maybe but yeah and it's like that's the algorithm the largest e-commerce thing ever one of the largest companies ever that's the best they could do is the like this is the software to like help you make

purchasing decisions yes so anyone downstream of that you don't try and make it help which is what confuses me because how is advertising so big but so pointless when i can't think of a single time that advertising has got me and again that might be you know me being quite arrogant thinking i've never i think there's two kinds of advertising in that sense of there's the brand building advertise like you know when like a coke or a mcdonald's ad advertises where it's like they know everyone knows about them what they're doing is sort of building themselves into your subconscious they're keeping up appearances yeah but that like targeted we're selling a single thing i i'm quite i don't think about it ever no that just that gets on my wick so if we if we try

to boil this back down to your original point which is something trying to help you when it when it is that prompt i think i feel the same way yeah i think now that i've disseminated it into the areas that it actually appears in my life when it's you know something popping up and going would you like this i'm like well no why did you think i would what information have you extrapolated this from is it a search that i've made because the scary thing is there's like the you hear the stories of like oh the woman like found out she was pregnant from like the walmart search algorithm or whatever the fuck um i don't think i know that oh no i'm remembering she didn't find out she was pregnant they sent a bunch of stuff to her she was like a young girl they sent

a bunch of stuff to her house like as advertising based on her searches and it like outed her being pregnant to her family oh wow yeah which is also like don't that's fuck yeah but they're just awful like but also like they work that out but then they can't work it's i don't know it's just a bizarre thing but i think it's don't help me when i don't ask for it with tech and what certainly don't do is like remove functionality or like impinge on my life to help me yeah when i don't want just leave it like yeah i think that's i think we're quite similar in that regard we like to do stuff at our own pace and do it in our own way and if something is just enforced upon us as help we we don't like that i certainly don't like that it actually makes me like push against

it a bit that's it i think now when i get those notifications i immediately disregard them because it's been wrong so many times and maybe the algorithm's changed but the fact that recently i bought a camera and now i'm being suggested would you like to buy a camera i'm thinking well no this algorithm is still not working well i bought that boot case and this tv stand if i bought everything that came on the following suggestions this room would be a library in terms of bootcases with like five tv stands in the middle of the room you yeah you would have thought maybe it's like oh would you like a reading light do you want some books like the thing is i'm i'm able to think of these things i don't know why that's difficult like i because

this has been a problem for so long surely someone can go if they bought the product don't sell them that exact category yeah there's certain things that you repeat by it's like you bought toilet paper would you like quilted toilet paper but instead it's would you you bought a one-time thing that should last you five to ten years would you like to buy another one right now they need to have a tag for like one time yes they need if i guess this common ground has changed into we hate the amazon suggestions which i'm happy with because i think i didn't explain it particularly well but you got me to a point where it makes sense yeah i try to understand it and i do completely understand this yeah the idea of things just kind of being thrown out there just

shit in the air yeah hoping something will stick but it's never stuck for me and that again that's amazon the most resourced company in the world so if you're designing anything please keep in mind the biggest company in the world couldn't figure it out so just have every button do what the button should do don't do any of the other shit don't put a hat on a hat yeah if you've got suggested stuff when you're buying something fair enough if you've got a new idea then fair enough and if anybody listening has bought something from an advert that you can think of that was a good purchase or i guess more interestingly that was a bad purchase where you've you've been coaxed by an advert or cold call anything at all if anyone's ever got in touch with you technology or person

and you've purchased something let us know because i'm really interested to know if i'm being overly cynical or if genuinely nobody adheres to this pattern yeah if anyone can think of a time that they've done that get in touch with us which i guess brings us to the wrap-up yeah which is that we found the common ground i think we're definitely one of our stronger agreements in a while yeah we're definitely on board with this one and if you want to let us know about these anecdotes you've got about buying something from an advert the email address

is info at warwithamate.co.uk the website is warwithamate.co.uk and the Instagram is just warwithamate. Let us know that let us know anything else let us know if you come to the live show 30th of May, Birmingham Games Expo

and from me James me Andy stay so humble and brave In the deserts of your minds, with no further suggestions. That's it. Good night and farewell. Thanks for listening. Bye! We'll be right back.