War With A Mate - Episode 91: Government Bread

Episode Date: August 30, 2026

The guys have taken it back to basics and have been revisiting the entirety of the rulebook to familiarise themselves in any gaps in knowledge, and this (coupled with hot weather and lack of sleep) has resulted in delirium. This week’s Mailbag teaches us all about teaching, Andy’s History Corner sees some corner-cutting to keep British bellies full, and Common Ground tells us that our time isn’t all that unique - except it is.

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Because we have your number. Hello and welcome to War With A Mate with me, James. And me, Andy. Andy? Oh, what the f... The Fruit Zone. coffee or pumpkin what the hell this is gonna be such a bad episode coffee you can't give a thumbs up people can't hear that

so welcome to war with a mate where we play spi's the campaign for north africa in its entirety one week at a time except we haven't started doing that yet we finished a practice run of six turns and now we're in this horrible in-between space where we've clearly lost our fucking minds because today's just been a mess. We've been reading the rules. We've read the first 10 cases of the rules. That went fine.

And then for the mic check, you just started screaming into the mic because I think you've absolutely lost it. And opening up was Fruit Zone. You're mad, man. You psychopath. You've got real problems, man. And I've had a really long day.

I've had a really bad day. i'm just a bit warm a bit warm yeah you know i am you know i am i've been sweating in the office all day i you told me not to wring out my shirt on your sofa before i if i should have to fucking tell you that it's a it's a safe space not for that kind of shit we're yeah we're playing the campaign for north africa it's taken a toll a little bit but i think we missed the game or it's a bit too warm today or maybe I didn't get enough sleep. I think the game

is, we do need the game a bit to ground us. Yeah, I mean, look where we are now. We've been cast adrift. This is yeah, I really worry how this one's going to turn out, man. Alright. Why'd you open with fruits? I know I'm all... Coffee's also

not a fruit, by the way. Just putting that out there. Yeah, it is. By what metric? The coffee beans are a fruit. No, they're not. They just are I'm not going to look that up, I'm telling you, no You can be wrong, that's fine It's my ball, it's my game

No It's our ball Right now it's in my hand Your ball in my hand That's what this one looks like Grim How did you find the rules, Andy? What do you think?

Reading back through the rules, you having fun with that? Yeah, it was nice It was good getting some just going through it without it being in relation directly to a rule clarification. Because normally when we're looking at it towards the end of the practice scenario

it's like, where's the rule for this exact thing? Yeah, whereas now we're doing all of them. Reading the whole thing. And I had a bit of fun looking through the unit part where it gives a breakdown of different types of units. Oh yeah. Because there is one specifically

for the Camel Yukon. Camel Yukon? Recon. jesus oh man if you're listening to this episode don't don't don't say that no it it's fair turn it off now guys it's it's not worth it the the uh the camel recon is an actual designation it's the piece has a unique symbol on it it's got a little c in the corner for camel oh yes for the actual um yeah like the unit pictures yeah that's pretty cool there's also um there's weather markers i don't think we've ever used those yeah we probably should because we have got weather wrong on an upstage before so well looking at these unit pieces i've realized it's going to

be a much busier board because a lot of it we just kind of abstracted to our notes like broken down vehicles oh yes prisoners we just kept track of those individually and on sheets if anything we should have put them down for transparency because that was the practice run. Yeah. Whereas now there's going to be more obfuscation, more secret sneaky stuff. They're on the board, though.

They should have been. They should have been. Otherwise, why give us the counters for them? I don't understand the game in its entirety, to be fair. And that's what you want to hear when you're playing the full campaign for North Africa. It's a long game. Anyone who's uninitiated,

I don't understand how you've come across this, but we thank you for listening and the game goes on for it's going to take us like 38 years you're chuckling at it's just coming on real low this week

I don't know because I feel high energy but I feel really out of place I really don't feel like I belong come on bud I think it's after you told me not to wring out my shirt that can't be grants for you feeling accepted somewhere because that's rancid behavior your rancid behavior you just started yelling into the mic during the sound check and it worked i think the most shocking thing is for everybody listening will be the revelation that we do a sound check

based on the way that some of this turns out and and the the knocking of the mics yeah we know about that by the way we we know that happens we know andy does that and then the other week when my mic was just buzzing through parts of it i don't know if you heard that that's weird i don't know what caused it tried my best to edit it out i'm sorry about that i uh i wish i was playing the game man it gives me more structure in my life i know what i'm doing this is a ragged mess Did find a rule we'd been doing wrong, though. Okay, okay. That's bad.

Pinning from the air. Yes, I'm aware of it. Only us lasts. Weirdly, it says in the pinned description, but not in the pin from the air bit, as far as I can tell, that it only lasts for the first cycle of a combat movement. Okay. So if you then go for, like, your second wave of, like,

moving within two hexes. Yeah, I think you're fine. Oh, right. okay we need to have a look at that then we'll double check it against the actual pins yeah by air part and then with the addenda but i did notice it's a sneaky place to put a rule in if it is we found that a lot though it'll be like these clarifications on like niche things where the more specific point on a rule will be buried away somewhere else and it's like well specifically when it relates to this thing it's actually different which isn't very helpful when you're

reading through a column or case to figure out how the game works yeah only to find later on oh that was actually not applicable for this situation yeah because also hold off barrages were in the zone of control section uh is that where they are uh yeah that's not good either which is a bit like what is going on here because you don't even know anything about bombardment yet by that point yeah when you when you walk through the rules it it does skip ahead a lot which i think is maybe a nature of the uh complexity but i think there is also like ideas are just sort of dotted throughout rather than structured it is kind of scatterbrained apart but it what what is crazy reading back through them is i'm amazed at just how much sense it makes now yes i remember reading

this the first time around and just thinking this is not going to be something i can ever comprehend that's what really did me in in the the prep run first time round was i didn't know what i was reading or how i would ever comprehend it yeah i was reading through and i was talking about toe points and and actual values and raw values and i was like i've got it in too deep to something i cannot ever understand or finish yes and now i'm reading through it and i'm like of course i know what this is toe points yeah do them all the time i've got toe points out the wazoo on my excel spreadsheets and it just it reads like fluid english and not some weird arcane yeah it no longer reads like a dead language written by i guess some sort of powerful lich here to steal

my life from the past oh the mummy yeah this is the mummy what is fun yeah this is on page 14 of the rules when it's talking about terrain effects oh yeah is it has little illustrations of a slope a ridge and an escarpment oh yeah i like that every other part of the rules it goes into really granular detail trying to describe something and they got to this part and whether it was richard berg or whoever else decided you know what i'm not going to get into the description of these things i'm just going to draw pictures i want to say pictures it's just lines because it's just slope is just a a slanty line yeah and a ridge is just a little like knuckle yeah and then escarpment is well and a scarf i'm doing exactly what i said those don't do which i'm describing what each

of them are i think you folk probably know what what a ridge slope and escarpment are i've got faith in our listeners andy i think they know exactly what those things are also there's not actually any reason to you couldn't be wrong about what all those things are and play the game as long as you get the hex side right that's true there's nothing misunderstanding as to what those terrain areas look like you know you could think an escarpment is like a deep ditch yeah or just like really tall trees next to each other on escarpment that's when there's like a bunch of redwood together yeah so i get advantages it's like okay it means you can't go uh up them with vehicle yeah which is true you can't go up a redwood tree in a car i'm looking forward to

the like engineer youtuber video of them making a car that drives up trees probably exists already but yeah bears they already made them cars that drive up trees yeah bears of course yeah well you could fit several people on a bear or in a bear they could exactly and they go vertical yeah and they have uh i guess that's actually where the similarities end but that's close enough for me yeah i don't have high standards that works attention to details not a strong suit uh no i can't i try to think of a joke there like a pun didn't work we'll move on swiftly i've got another one um that we should have done that was pretty big actually for the end of the

game it's not stuff i want to hear andy but it's stuff i need to hear what else did we miss so this is the effects of zona control um 10.21 zona controls extend into all hexes on the game map with the following exceptions they don't go through seaside hexes river hexes or lakeside hexes which is fine they don't extend through escarpment hex sides really indeed ah that changes things a little bit yes does that mean you could have made the push up i could have just gone past you could have went up to bardia yeah fuck you could attack me but i guess you couldn't hold me there i don't think i could attack well i could have you can attack yeah but the thing is you would have been moving because you weren't in a zone of control a quote yeah you weren't actually

in it, you would have just been passing through it to get the Bardia, which means even then it wouldn't trigger an attack, because you're not moving out of the zone of control or into one. Yes, I think you could declare an attack down it on your movement in combat. On mine I could, but in theory you could just walk straight past. Oh yeah, that's what I mean. So if you

would have needed to move a guy round for, you know where the bottleneck came out, and hold it there, and then you could have used the ridge. Man, that makes that defensive position much less threatening. I mean, if you hold... If you hold the bottleneck up on the coast south of Bardia

and then the Hellfire Pass one, I think it's still pretty strong. It is, but... Because if you try to get through either of those, you're also not in a zone of control if you put guys on top. So you can, like, hammer down. Yeah.

I guess also, yeah, with combat, it's when you're adjacent, you have to fight. The zone of control doesn't really come into that. The zone of control just means you can or can't move. Well, I guess we'll have to check that. is it when you're adjacent or is it when you enter a zone of control? I'm sure it says adjacent, but again

it's one of those things where the more specific thing takes precedent so we'll have to double check and see which one is more refined and if it's unclear I guess we just have to make a judgment call maybe there's something in the addenda but don't know about that

so the sections that we've read, so we've read the first ten I also read eleven, just for fun what a swat yeah bedtime reading it really sends me off so we read the introduction how to play the game glossary and unit definitions that was a fun one game equipment which uh we had a little chat about this previously uh off mic um you realize that we got an extra die yeah it says you get two die so we've got one extra which i guess means there's a version out there one one less d6 maybe we need

to find the the sister game to our copy and reunite yeah absolutely we'll keep that one in good nick yeah and we'll we'll pass it on to whoever's missing it so if if any of you folks out there know someone who's got the campaign for north africa but they're missing one of the smaller die well it's actually we have to watch a video of you opening it from the plastic yes and it not having a dice in because otherwise we didn't open it from plastic to be fair i don't care for all we know the the person holding this of a imaginary person to a much higher standard well first of all they're not imaginary they exist it's it's true objectively that this person is out there somewhere they might be what sounded like gunfire on your street someone's uh motorbike

is not healthy yeah i thought that was it for us there i thought someone finally got sick of what we're doing maybe it's the person with the sister game they're here to reclaim the die but yeah there's someone out there that that person might be alive or not but somebody out there has that copy of the game if anybody knows of someone who's got the game and they're missing that small die let us know we have it and they are entitled to it they can come to andy's house and pick it up in person we'll meet a neutral fit at your location send me over an email info at warwithamate.co.uk i will give you andy's address and if you've got the die let us know about that as well great carte blanche access to andy's home there's no business there uh you can

meet the celebrity on the couch uh you can come and play the game you can take the game if you want as well actually it'll be a great time we'll do a sleepover uh you can take andy's bed uh and yeah it'll be a great time i'm not hugely in favor of this andy's address is i was very tempted to say it as a bit now and then edit it out but i i i'm not gonna trust myself that i would remember to edit that out not that i think any of the listeners would come to your house they all seem like folk getting on with their own stuff oh yeah but you know one of six is one i don't have to be a listener my address is just floating around it's all right there's no way to access it unless you listen to every episode right i've staggered it in such a

way and do that in order to listen to one episode you need to listen to the one prior i guess there is if i had the power to do that i would the power to create narrative i don't have that yeah you like playing dnd with me what else did we read we read uh after that we got into the um the land game the sequence of play the capability point system that's always good fun initiative which i very rarely get so i don't i don't care land movement is a big one of course land movement's a big chunky one yeah um stacking and zones of control i also read into combat system yeah uh so yeah stacking is i don't know how much we've talked about stacking i don't think this has come up very often no i guess it's probably something we've not mentioned

because it happens kind of in between stuff yeah so stacking points are another thing to keep track of in specific hexes, because you can only have so many guys in a hex. A division is five stacking points, and most places can only have six. So like a clear tile,

your average tile with no extra wacky stuff going on, can have six stacking points. So you can have a division and then a battalion. I think that's so you can put and separate battalions from a division without

like breaking yeah because otherwise you you wouldn't ever be able to break guys off yeah you would have to like move to a big hex and then break people off so i wouldn't put it past that you can only reorganize in cities i'm glad they didn't do that i'm so glad he i'm glad he gave us that saving grace so yeah you you have to make sure you don't overstep that because you can't have that many guys there so battalions are like one stacking point and then you've got brigades or regiments are like two or three stacking points. Divisions are five.

So it makes it much more cost effective to have a division that wraps everything up, because then you can have so many more guys, and the stacking points don't overflow. Cities can have eight stacking point value, and garrisons don't count towards that.

We found that out towards the very end of the practice run. I think it was actually the last play session. And they also, well some of them can leave. Oh, some of them Is it a mix? I think so, yeah. I'm pretty sure my guys can leave. But just not the, like, coastal guns that have no CPA.

Yeah, those guys can't. Yeah. They definitely shouldn't be moving. Stacking points also play a part in combat. Yes, organization size. Yes, which uses stacking points for the shorthand on the, like, comparison table. But if you've got, like, a division versus one,

so five versus one stacking points, is it three columns to your benefit it moves along difference to four i think if it's um yeah difference of four columns so yeah if you've got a battalion up against a division it immediately shifts regardless of the actual combat might you'd have a very small division of realistically you could have a division that is the same size in terms of toe strength points well you could have ones you when towards the end of that division that became a shell would have the size advantage on like a single unit of infantry yeah but that unit would double its toe uh its points so it would also get the smaller unit can in theory also get an overwhelming

uh numbers advantage boost yes because you get a boost for stacking point value so organizational size difference but then there's also one for if you have more than double or at least double the strength of the other unit that you're opposing that also provides a swing so yeah you could have it swing in both directions from size and might which is it makes sense yeah it's but it is a fun like it is a fun quirk of the game as there are many quirks in the game didn't find anything that gives it clarity on the camels but i know there's nothing in there because we've ctrl f'd the searchable document and found absolutely nothing of any any help whatsoever yeah i mean i didn't find too many surprises in this section which i'm glad about because the cpa

and movement are the two like core structures so if we'd be getting a bit like if we mess something up to do with like how cpa works that's so fundamental because it dictates every action in the game yeah that means we fundamentally destroyed how the game functions yeah which um so it's good we've not run into too many i think one we're gonna see things is when we get towards the back of this where there's the reserves and probing don't fully get i get i get them in concept so concept wise yeah reserve i'll definitely need to double check because there were some things we talked about where you know trucks could be immune to damage if they're reserved and probe is just a smaller attack yeah i probed you technically in the the last last go i noticed if you use less

than like 50 of your maximum available isn't it yep but i can't remember why it matters it changes the losses i believe i'm not sure entirely how but it does i don't think i found any any mistakes in the rules that we made it sounds like you've picked up a few so it's bad that i didn't catch those but that's that's the benefit of this that's why we're both reading through them yeah so you can't pick individual lines that have just we've like that's the thing something very important is like one line and then some rambling thing it's like not that important and covers an entire block yeah that's that's the hard part about this game it's so vast it is truly a desert and we are we're trying to navigate said desert and not in a bus not on camelback but with our

eyes just imagine that andy navigating and going through a desert with your eyes bad idea would bad idea hey now that that is good comedy that is very good um i'd shake your hand but we're too far away yeah that's why we're not shaking hands yeah yeah stay over there i will yeah good very happy to i'm sweaty today so not as sweaty as you no i don't know what it was today i've had a i've had a really long day and i feel like the office i work in was just particularly warm or I was particularly warm. I don't think I slept very well last night. And I feel like my body's just rebelling a bit.

I had a lot of chocolate today. Cool. So you're kind of crashing and on a hyper and also too hot. Yeah, yeah. It's my birthday's coming up. I'm kind of hyped for that. You know, I think there's a lot of stuff going on. It's, yeah, it's doing a lot to me.

It's doing a lot to my body. It's doing a lot to my mind. um i had a i had a run-in with a a smoke alarm the other day and it i had a dream about it last night you want to run in with a smoke alarm yeah so i was at i was at my pal's uh you've met him you know who i'm talking about yeah yeah uh you actually do um and uh i was around they were playing some some game played some balder's gate and when i was walking down to theirs from the shop we'd been up the shop first got some snacks and i'd wandered down the street and there was just a smoke alarm blaring like a you know like the beeping alarm oh yeah but like a like a really

high-pitched one and i was like what is that and he said oh someone's put a smoke alarm in that bin like they disconnected it oh jesus christ and put it in their bin so it was just shrieking all through the day and all through the night and it had been going on for four days that because that's gone in the bin because someone's lost their fucking mind in the house yes and when they've taken it out it's now blaring down the street so he was like yeah this is all like i don't know who to call and i was like yeah because it's not like a non-emergency fire brigade number because every time you call the fire brigade it really should be an emergency oh yeah there can't really be a case of like i've got this fire under control but in like four hours it's going to start

getting out of hand well they come and help out if like a cat gets stuck in a tree or something yeah i don't know how you got a hold of them for that i think it's just you just have to like like holler at them like down the street goes on the bottom of the queue and if there's not any fires are going on they like clear that backlog yeah but how do you get in touch with them in the first place because you got you don't call 999 and say my cat's stuck in a tree there's a non-emergency police number surely there's a non-emergency fire department number but no because with the police it's like there's been a crime it does not an immediate like threat to life or danger but i do need you to look into this that's fair enough same with the non-emergency um you know paramedic

health service where it's like i'm not too sure what's going on here i feel i feel ill this is bad what do i do don't send an ambulance just tell me what's going on with a fire brigade it's like oh there's a fire but don't worry about it come come when you can come at your own convenience yeah but you can need to get in touch with them for other stuff what though like what if you're pre-planning a fire then you're a piece of shit what if you're making a film or something or like you're doing something where you're doing controlled burns i don't think you call them that i don't think you call the fire brigade i think it's you should tip them off you should be like tip them off hey guys there's gonna be a fire here don't worry about it it's deliberate

i i think they would come quicker that's awesome that's very suspicious i'm starting a fire don't come you'll definitely be able to like get in touch about non-emergency fire stuff well clearly not but anyway anyway since that doesn't exist um i was leaving his place and it was quite late on in the night and i was stood there in the street waiting for my uber and i could just hear it blaring out and i was like you know what no this isn't fair so i wandered around to the back alley found the bin in question and rooted around in the bin to find the bin bag it was in ripped open the bin bag took out the smoke alarm and applied enough newtons of force to it with gravity as my aid

and ended the shriek of the smoke alarm saving the neighborhood from another poor night's sleep and the word hero gets thrown around quite a lot these days almost too much almost like it's lost all meaning go on almost but this time i'm reclaiming it for an actual hero oh was there a hero on the scene while you were doing that yeah while you were going through the trash like a womble and you have never seen a womble save a neighborhood you've never watched the wombles then it's all about saving their neighborhood well then i'm then i'm robbing people well then i'm a womble yeah none of the wombles are heroes well well either way i'm a hero so whether it's a womble or not i'm a hero so i just thought that's a fun little anecdote to share with you

and and i i keep on dreaming about the the noise so i don't know if i don't know if there's like a curse on me after i destroyed it like some sort of smoke alarm revenant is now you know befalling me i don't know i don't know how that works i don't know the rules how magic works in regards to fire alarms yeah so i don't know i think something's going on with me i think i'm just really tired and just pretty exhausted i think i agree it looks like you are it looks like it yeah you look pretty fucked as well no i look like a really nice man so the rules what are we saying oh yeah i guess there's one uh

one more as well for the end of the game turn just take a breather have a beer and a sandwich contact your loved ones and let them know you're alive i have informed my loved ones since the last time we recorded that i have a podcast you have this was a big moment yeah yeah so this was um so when we recorded with cam you you then went off and met your family right after yeah and you broke the news to them yeah how did they take it good i mean it's not a bad thing i don't know why i was hiding for so long yeah it kind of takes the mystique away from it a little bit i was hoping for the moment where one day it's kind of like a break and bad situation where like hank finds out about walter white i was hoping for that with your family finding the

podcast i wanted to see how big it can get before they find out that was a fun ultimate experiment it was good i think it was really good um i i wish it went further and i think if anything you've kind of ruined part of the charm of the podcast but my dad was saying he might make us some of those things general hubs to push things around the map oh heck yeah that'd be good so there you go swings and roundabouts i guess also hi andy's parents if you're listening welcome to welcome to the podcast pretty late in the game and uh i can't imagine you've listened to all of the episodes you probably jumped in late on otherwise dedication we'll send you some free merch don't promise them free they're getting free merch it's coming out of your pockets

you know loads of people i know know about the podcast they don't listen to it you should be honored they did give it a listen did they have any thoughts said it was all right i don't think i'll keep listening but so they started at the beginning uh yes i did tell them not to but they were gonna they said they'd check out how it started poorly kind of like this this is a real throwback kind of like today this is this is really uh in every sense of the words it's back to basics today it is but shall we go back to something that wasn't there at the start that gives us a bit of structure uh oh you you want to yeah i guess that's it we've called it for the the rules we've read those first 10 cases and then i guess we'll we'll be reading the rest

throughout i mean they go all the way to like what case 50 or 60 yeah so we'll we'll read these incrementally probably next time we'll cross off a bunch more all together rather than doing this 10 at a time because we've got other board games we want to play as well and if i hadn't had such a run ragged day we could have probably played a board game as well but i well i didn't have the time man father time is against me but that's it we've we've read the rules we're making progress spreadsheets are gonna be underway soon i've been doing a bit more tactical planning for the full game oh nice excited for that we've got another what nine weeks until we start oh yeah episode 100 it's the big one um announcement coming soon about what that looks like should be fun

and we'll be we'll be starting the full game on episode 130th of october it's a biggie but before then uh we we do we do have to stay true to our vow that we began all the way back in episode nine we made the vow andy and that was to read all of the mail every piece of mail that we are sent we will read it if if you want us to read it you can pop in we've had a few bits of mail actually come in in the last week where people have put in the subject line this is not for the pod and it's been interesting stuff i've liked it and anything you want to send you can i mean you have you send us things we're gonna read some right now the first one is from neil's would you like to go ahead andy what me yep one second i've i've been staring at a screen

like all day yeah i've got it hello uh another a bit longer email subject hello dear mates with a wall that's backwards i like it he's got me there it's been a bit since i last sent an email and i've been saving a few topics but first before commenting on what you talked about on the pod i'd like to ask a few questions first concerning future emails do you prefer to be sent larger emails like this with a bunch of topics or do you prefer multiple smaller emails i like getting both to be honest but i would say if you do send us a longer one it might not it might take longer for us to get to just fitting it in whereas if we're doing like three of the smaller ones or yes because we we try and fit it so if we've got like a long game like if we're if it's truck day we know we're

probably going to have more time to do emails because truck date there's nothing to talk about yeah whereas if it's a big combat session then we'll probably in date order we'll you know skip a couple of the super long ones and do a couple of the small ones so if you're sending a big one we will we'll as everything will read us but um yeah by all i guess whatever you feel neil's um whether it's the case if you want to pop it all in one big email and then we get around to it and you get your your moment in the sun for your big long email or if you just want to fire a few through there's no cap on how many emails you can send you know break them up as much as you wish we'll probably not do your back-to-back in every episode if you do that because if you like

weird that might be a bit unfair but we'll circle back around to you so whatever you wish it's it's your email account that you're sending it from we don't have control over that uh you you are your own your own person you are your own mailbag in a sense i'm talking absolute crap here um sorry andy continue another question more relating to the podcast i had is how many listeners do you have across all platforms if you don't want to answer that one because of privacy concerns or anything completely understandable um no we're not particularly secret about it we we don't know exactly because we we release our episodes through rss and that goes on to a bunch of different platforms like spotify amazon apple pretty much every kind of podcast service it just rolls it

out but then we also release through youtube and for some reason it doesn't pool everything together so we have kind of piecemeal figures that don't make up a full picture so we don't know exactly how many people but it seems to be somewhere in the region of like what would you say like maybe collectively 5 000 maybe no no that seems high how many is it do you think between like actual repetitive listeners because it ebbs and flows we get like peaks it does i'd say we tend to at the minute we've been getting roughly a thousand to a thousand five hundred on an episode in the week yes no i'm thinking of the backlog as well yeah yeah because we when we the thing is we've got so many episodes now that when someone finds it they become 80 downloads for the yeah

if someone binges it um yes we hit like um over the last month but it's been the biggest that we've had it for a long time um well ever we're at an all-time high because last month we hit something like 15 000 downloads yeah that was our figure for last month and that's just rss we don't know what it is on youtube because we don't have a way to check most of it's on rss i'd guess yeah so yeah 15 000 through last month and then this month we're are we have we hit 30 000 no i'm just shy mid 20s it's been a few days since i checked but yeah yeah so we're like nearly doubled for that month which is crazy yeah and before then it was it was usually sub 10 000 a month yeah last month was the first time we broke 10 000 in a month yes and now we've nearly doubled that so

we've had like a crazy spike yeah i mean it was had a big reddit post and then a bunch of uh you guys mentioned us in it about the game so yes thanks for that that seems to everyone who's out there doing our way yeah everyone doing the the free advertising for us thank you it's great to share this cautionary tale with more people um there was an article written about us two weeks ago on wargamer.com or .co.uk that's the one I sent you a link to someone wrote an article about our

reddit post of finishing the practice run which is a fun read I like their take on that so there's a bit of a buzz going on and it's cool so thanks for everyone who shares and talks about what we do we've just hit over

100 Spotify reviews that are 5 star, that's awesome yeah, it's really mean going seems to be doing pretty well so yeah thanks to you guys very much yeah we we charted um for the first time in the uk which was crazy we were in the top um top 200 podcasts uh comedy podcasts in the uk we were for a period of time in new zealand for like a couple days rated above uh worst idea of all time in terms of viewership yeah like two days which i know it's like a tiny like splooge spike but that was crazy because those guys are uh i mean my favorite podcast

yeah and definitely they're pretty huge so yeah we've we've um that's our our listener base in a snapshot mostly in australia um of our five biggest cities where we have four of them are australia for australia yeah the other one chicago and then i think it's boston and then i think it's cities in the uk start coming and do it so yeah that's it um but no you're more than welcome to ask neils we're not shy about it we just don't have exact answers because we don't know what we're doing now more to give my two cents on uh goings on in the episodes in episode 73 you mentioned the ottoman siege of vienna and the following rescue by polish cavalry and the following in the steps of my last email there's also a sabaton song about that one as well called

winged hussars nice and the way the history segments are currently going you might stumble upon another one seven pillars of wisdom which is about lawrence of arabia who is originally a british agent in the ottoman empire and support different tribes i believe that's the correct term could be wrong in their fight for independence we actually are we're talking about watching lawrence of arabia for something so yes you've nailed that it's not going to be a history segment but you have sniped some lawrence of arabia coming up uh yes um yeah um that is some of the uh the bonus bits and pieces that we have in the works so keep an eye out neil's you uh you will see something about that at some point do take that with a description with a massive grain of salt

this is just uh what i remember from reading the wikipedia article on him over half a decade ago with hearing the song and wanting to know more immediately after that history segment you talked about how uh there's so much incredibly interesting history that wasn't taught at school i would argue that school sucks at presenting history in an interesting manner i would agree i had a good history teacher at high school but the curriculum was really boring i feel like it was henry the eighth in world war ii yeah you know what that's i remember that i remember in um when i was in school i i did really poorly in yeah seven my first year in secondary school and um because i did none of the homework i didn't do any homework during school which not great um

yeah i just hate the idea of you do your work and then you come home and do more work like my office doesn't do that that'd be crazy yeah it's i don't know what what it's it's there for well i guess to study um i do know what it's there for i'm being facetious but i ended up because of that the next year i got put into the bottom set for history and i'd like to think i'm kind of a well informed guy i i'm able to pick up information understand things but i was put in a class of people who weren't quite there so it meant that they i remember at one point we were learning about henry the eighth and somebody asked is he still alive and i was like i don't think i'm in the right class man that's a rough one i was moved out of it thankfully they did realize that

it wasn't that i'm not capable of learning it's i just refuse to do work um which it's now look at me now look at me mr curtis i'm doing the campaign for north africa what do you think now stuff your homework on battle of hastings i don't need it um i've got i've got 25 000 people who listen a month 25 000 downloads a month sorry mr curtis i'm gonna stop telling you the numbers i'm gonna stop talking to mr curtis please do um also consider that i'm also very much not an expert about pedagog pedog you having a bad one too buddy pedagogy oh i can't help you with this man it's also a word i want to get right

uh pedagogy pedagogy yeah yeah pedagogy yeah or pedagogy one of the two okay that's the science and art of teaching okay oh cool well as we know yeah relax on that i just know a bit about a lot of topics many people would consider niche and all this is basically just a random person in the internet state in their opinion in the way the current school system is set up aka the prussian model of education is bad at people getting passionate about subjects because it's basically just the teacher talking at the students who are expected to soak up all the knowledge being thrown at them and then regurgitate it on a test later yeah i completely agree well that's why i thought i did which was a mistake at a level i did like maths science chemistry and did very poorly on

them and did all right on re in hindsight i should have done history because i really liked it but i had the thing of like well i'm just terrible at remembering names and dates so i just can't so i'm not good at this yeah which again is crazy because well one i've started retaining a lot more history information from what you've been talking about so i imagine you've also retained a lot of it oh yeah because you've put it into a creative lens of your recounting stuff that you've learned and not just remembering stuff like in history exams from what i recall I mean, it's a while ago now for me, but it wasn't, like, recounted creatively.

Yeah. Whereas the history segment is that. You've probably found a way to digest and understand the information way better. I think if I'd kept going with it, that's what it becomes later on, is you need to, like, build arguments and structures around research.

But in the start bit, it's just, like... In, like, GCSE level and prior to that. Yeah. It's a lot of, like, a few essay questions and then, like... which are also set up in such a way to be like, this is your chance to regurgitate these things from the

syllabus and make this argument like you've been taught. Yeah. I'm with Niels on this. I don't think that it allows for engagement or excitement, and teachers are doing their best. Oh, yeah. I don't think it's their fault.

I think it's the need to standardize. Yeah, the syllabus and stuff. Big credit to teachers for doing what they're doing, but I think the structure of it it does become a memory test yeah and it doesn't really test understanding for the most part is is my stance so yeah no um a big big enough big in that i'd say it's quite a reach to call that learning that's memorization at best if you think back to school and the best the best teachers are probably those uh who did not follow the standard formula of talking to students but changed it up in some way also learning would probably be a lot more interesting if it were

more self-directed aka you learn about stuff you're actually curious about 100 i would love that i'd love if history was like oh we're going to teach you about like research techniques and stuff but if you like the aztecs and this other kid likes napoleon and or whatever as long as you're showing the like techniques it shouldn't matter what the topic is yeah i mean there's some you need some basis of like a shared cultural base i guess yeah yeah but that that's what we mentioned there like you know world war ii henry the eighth yeah you get that anyway but when it comes to tests and exams maybe equip the the people to do it and then they go off and do that yeah because you know we're qualified to rewrite the teaching syllabus of the uk oh yeah i mean

we've shown through common ground we're incredibly arrogant oh that's the word i knew there was a word for it i do not recall the number of the episode but i really enjoyed the talk about more words in general and especially for different kinds of love and the listener mail responding to that by a fellow aromantic uh wishing you much cake and garlic bread by a fellow aromantic asexual there's also a few things about the most recent episode i'd like to talk about as of writing this uh most recent is 79 another listener jordan said they had made a playlist i also made a playlist uh i believe i sent you an email about it um probably before the new logo uh but apparently it was lost yeah we did lose a bit a while ago so yeah it might have been lost in amongst that

um but yes if it was you that made that first one neil's i know there's two playlists on on youtube so thank you for that um big help that they're all in one place because again when it releases on youtube and rss it all just kind of gets lumped off um so yeah thank you for giving that a bit of structure i think someone else has now followed in in your footsteps but uh yeah hey as long as there's playlists out there we we appreciate it very much more playlists floating around the better more chances for people to stumble on them yeah spread it like wildfire everyone make a playlist another thing i'd like to talk about is this episode's common ground getting rid of cars which is one i do feel quite strongly about for context i live in uh what

would officially what would count officially as a village i did want to look up the actual cutoffs for the village where i live and where i live qualifies the bus in the city center comes twice an hour during most of the day once an hour on weekends holidays and evenings until about 2 a.m when there aren't any holidays um i'm not i'm not at all during the remaining hours of the day and on holidays weekends after 10 p.m and the bus takes an hour either way which is 10 minutes longer than it would take by bike so public transport's not really convenient for me that's that's a nightmare yeah um i i know i know that i've rubbed people the wrong way a little bit with the whole cars thing but um yeah well this is why we need better public transport

this is if anything going to be a real boon for you it's going to reshape the way that your city or village works so you know what's the space when i become i don't know what it'd have to be god emperor uh i will i will put this in place uh despite this i don't do not drive do you want me to take over from here by the way this is a long email yeah well and we'll pass the baton i feel bad for you having to go through all of it alone despite this i do not drive do not have a driving license and have a hatred for car centric infrastructure which means i'm fully on board with the idea of getting rid of cars hey except for the most extreme circumstances and i would go even further than you did i think nobody should have a car except for those living in the most

remote areas and those that desperately need cars for that job like emergency services i'm with you neil's i think 100 that is that was my common ground of course this will require massive infrastructure upgrades as you acknowledge in common ground so i will re i will presuppose that the necessary infrastructure will have been created in advance of this implementation. And from what's been talked about, that seems well within the realm of possibilities in the Common Ground Cinematic

Universe. CGCU or CGU as an official abbreviation. You can make a ruling on that. Yeah, the CGCU or CGU. CGU. CGU. Yeah. Yeah. Shops would not need their own cars for resupplying. Oh, don't say resupply.

Don't use that word. this has already been implemented as part of a dutch city cargo trams that can carry supplies for stores to restock with less parked cars around trucks have more room to maneuver and load off their cargo while pedestrians and cyclists can go around it more easily than cars when it comes to long distance travel i believe a good high spiel raid system high speed rail system rather and a few airports would be very much sufficient even better as there would not be traffic jams there'd still be delays i believe there would be significant uh significantly less on a well-funded rail system and even if the delays were long as traffic jams they would still be better because

you would just sit around maybe being productive maybe other another pleasant activity like playing cards or maybe maybe listen to war with a mate that's pretty good in a in a commute oh yeah in the library of everything common ground we've already transcended capitalism which means money itself has been transcended which means the whole transportation system could be free i agree free transportation this means if the library of everything has free public transit where it's implemented on a global stage we'd reach actual communism in a positive sense of the word and a slightly less off the rails advantage as public transport is more accessible you don't need specialist knowledge to operate things like cars and i could very much continue

on that subject but i'll leave you with my closing thoughts you mentioned in another episode in your early common ground about cats yep i remember that a filter that might prevent cats from coming any further i as someone who lives with two cats one of them is constantly walking across the keyboard as i type this very much enjoy that presence is happy i do not click off as you do have a bunch of takes i'm very much in favor of library of everything public transport stance on generative ai to name a few and lastly i saw a meme about house of leaves i've not read it yet but i thought james might enjoy it i did i did it as a fun meme i love a good niche meme reference though nisha the better and if it's house of leaves love that book i've started another reread

of it this game is very much my house on ash tree lane wishing you the best of luck crossing the deserts of your minds subtly humbly and bravely neils what an email neils that is that's outstanding work and it vindicates me in some areas with my common ground. It vindicates me and Andy and I guess a lot of the population in terms of teaching and it's

also got a little slice of history in there. It's got everything. Everything that a good email can have. So thank you for sending that, Niels. Thank you everybody else who's fired over an email to us and you can reach us on info at warwithamate.co.uk The website, which we'll be getting a revamp

very soon, is warwithamate.co.uk and the instagram is always popping off it's just war with a mate we've been keeping interactive doing some polls some questions i've been doing some video responses for some of those to keep things fresh and upbeat so follow us along on there and we post every week for the episode as well yeah so that's that's the mailbag fire over what you want to we'd love to hear from you and update wise as you know some bonus stuff coming we've got the big episode 100 with a slightly different format so that'll be fun and we also have a video that we recorded with the echoes of war guys we met back up with them yes that should be out by now right that should be out

when you're listening to this yes because there's some video video stuff on there so we've put it straight on the youtube yes that will just be on youtube because the audio i don't think it'll follow as well and we had a few audio issues connectivity problems so that's probably better real issues we were in the same building but your internet dropped off part way through yeah but it was great to catch up with the echoes of war guys they're they're doing well they've still got their stuff going echoes of war or pacific war channel on i think they're fully not pacific war channel anymore i think it still comes up under that channel name i think i guess you can search for reba but yeah but yeah those guys are great when it comes to their history content they're

exclusively history and very broad with what they cover um but also still very in depth so check out craig and gaurav over at uh echoes of war they're awesome and they joined us again after after a long gap in between we hadn't released an episode or done anything the last time we spoke to them we hadn't those guys took a chance on us we were we didn't even have a name for the podcast i don't think at that point no i think i'm still trying to get us to call it the elephant thank god that didn't stick great seo if you ask me oh well andy you've um you've you i'm afraid you've got yourself into a corner here because uh you've you've just rambled and had to read through a long email and now i'm gonna i'm gonna sit back here and relax a little bit after my long day

because i'm going to hand the reins to you so that you can take us through some history yeah let's do it 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 at this point i gave little thought to my past but i've always been interested in boats in the sea I am more or less in the position of a campus in command of a ship which is on the point of sinking because errors are present

we are absolutely not qualified to share views on history alright Andy, when and where are we? we are doing World War 1 still for the British we're still plugging away we got up to 1917 last time we're coming towards the end of it then

start with a quote of course naturally don't waste bread save two slices every day and defeat the u-boats i've always said that sorry what are we doing just throwing bread in the water and blocking the water i don't get it maybe by the end you will okay you know sorry i'm jumping ahead that's very facetious of me yeah so we're in 1917 now the war's been going on for two and a half years the british have suffered 300 000 dead with a favor million wounded or captured that sucks big time oh yeah the war is also having a much greater effect at home uh as the war goes on its state control recruitment and the effects of the war expands so before the war britain had been importing 60 of its

food uh before the war even started okay i might i imagine this is probably shot up yeah the food situation gets to the point in february 1917 that the government implements voluntary rationing uh supported by a massive propaganda outfit similar to the uh recruitment they're like if we have to make it mandatory it'll be like a huge morale blow so they're trying to keep it voluntary at first yeah i think yeah from a morale perspective they're doing the right thing here Yeah. The initial allowance was limited to, was limits on bread, meat, and sugar. The allowance for a person per week was 1.1 kilogram of meat and 340 grams of sugar and 1.8 kilograms of bread. So it's not a lot for a week.

Actually, that feels like a lot of bread. Bread's kind of light. um well maybe not this bread because they also stopped using white flour to make bread and made government bread from potatoes and oats sorry government bread yep is that the actual term yep government bread what the fuck from potatoes and oats so i'm gonna see if i can get a picture up with government bread oh i didn't actually look it up it probably looks rank i feel like this might be some sort of like colloquial term that might mean something else now government bread uh national loaf yeah i i have heard of national loaf but i do like its government name is government bread um they even set up culinary courses all around the country to teach people

how to cook with cheaper and more plentiful ingredients such as using potatoes to make bread to support all this even the royal family take a vow to reduce their food consumption to match the working class in an effort to pressure other wealthy people into following the rules a bit of peer pressure never hurt anyone oh yeah the royals also dug up the lawns of all the royal palaces to make allotments which was part of a national scheme to turn parks and other open spaces into allotments so just anywhere there was like grass it was like we need to grow food there i like that actually that's quite a fun um fun visual yeah it's it would actually be like a probably quite nice looking nicer than like a modern council estate if like every garden is

an allotment it would look kind of beautiful in the end yeah yeah i just i don't know it's for bleak reasons because of war yeah this basic allowance you said it sounded like quite a lot yeah for bread it was 1300 calories a day yeah that's easy man which meant that poor families who couldn't subsidize their calories uh with expensive unrationed substitutes uh began to starve that's not good no uh while the wealthy were able to supplement their base diet it was also voluntary so people could just avoid it if they didn't care about social pressure i guess that's everything though isn't it i guess once it's mandatory it's yeah but you're always gonna have that you're always gonna have these people immune to social

pressure oh yeah those people who don't want government bread i mean basically it's the people not using the government bread or the people who didn't get masks and covid it's the same archetype oh right okay now i know who we're talking about one of the things that's compounding all of these issues is the german u-boats who got unleashed into the atlantic to hunt supplies with a specific goal of starving out britain the germans went are happy hunting to the u-boats basically in february of 1917 before then they had like some restrictions on who they could go after And they also had to, like, surface and be like, we're going to sink this ship, so you need to all get on your lifeboats.

And from this point, they were just like, fire the torpedo, move on to the next one. So in 1917 alone, they sank 860,000 tons of supplies. That's a lot of supplies. So much supplies. And by August, they'd sank 1.5 million tons of merchant shipping. Oh, God. That's so much food in the water.

Yeah. the ducks would have had a field day oh there must have been like whales and stuff just in the atlantic like deep down being like this is actually pretty sweet i've now got a taste for pork loin oh the tragedy of a whale that gets a taste for pork and can never have it again i don't know if it would i'm not sure what the taste buds are like on a whale i have no idea i don't know if like being underwater kind of because i imagine if i was eating bread underwater i wouldn't taste it as much well actually it's probably more so because sharks sense blood from like miles away and that's a taste thing oh yeah so maybe it

enhances it maybe they maybe they experience pork like we can only imagine maybe i need to start it will be salty as well oh oh i might start eating all my stuff underwater in the sea you would still wouldn't have a whale's taste buds i know but i'd have you know a new lease on life i'd probably drown i guess i'm not gonna stop you you can't i'm too quick yeah they actually get really close to starving out britain uh at one point britain has six weeks of wheat left we too overrated yeah at one point the sugar supply line crashes to the point they have four days of sugar left at the lowest point and you'll remember from the one about the health act stuff sugar at this point is a huge part of their diet because it's relatively cheap per calorie so they're just

supplementing calories with missing like missing calories with sugar so that's why they only have four days left because people have a lot more sugar than usual whereas if they hadn't implemented all this maybe this would be a few weeks or months of sugar left well before that it was even more so because they just put sugar in tea instead of eating proper foods yeah no that's a good point actually yeah so they'd actually ran out of sugar yeah they need the sugar britain tried a number of uh oh yeah this leads to massive bread lines for the first time like in anyone's lifetime at this point and also soaring prices britain tries a number of things to protect their supply lines uh well many of which work one of them is the convoy system where merchant ships grouping up

into fleets and are protected by the royal navy instead of sort of just coming across one at a time which feels like yeah it's one of the things where it feels like why weren't you doing that already yeah i imagine there's a logistical reason but oh yeah but they also implement the plow policy which all its farms are turned pasture land and animal for animals into growing wheat so it's no you can't have that big open field for your cows to graze we've eaten most your cows already anyway and we need as much calorie per acre as possible which means you're growing wheat yeah get rid of these bovines yeah bovine skulls everywhere littered around like it's some middle of the the desert this uh actually is relatively successful and leads to the biggest

wheat harvest in british history in late 1917 never got back to that well we never hit the wheat peaks again back in the day fucking government bread stupid potato bread so much like with military recruitment it reaches a point where they can no longer rely on volunteering so they start rolling out compulsory rationing they start of sugar where each household sign up at a specific grocer and gets a fixed amount of sugar per week then of course after sugar they went for spice and all things nice not quite they went for margarine butter and meat well i haven't said butter is all things nice yeah um i guess it's also good you can have spiced meat i do love meat it's yeah spice anything on spice

nope cool um my legs are from under me there randy i'm sorry i did yeah uh so yeah they update the defense of the realm act uh with the margarine butter and meat rationing order which makes it illegal to buy or sell those things without a coupon from february 1918 the complete rationing system was set up and standardized across the country by 1918 using a coupon system again where you have to go and register at your local green grocer and you can't buy things from anyone from any other ones but i imagine you've got like black market grocers oh yeah you will definitely have people like selling stuff out the back of the store or whatever the dark grocer

the only thing they never put rations on were potatoes and bread because they're cheap and filling and sometimes the potato is all the bread so up to 1917 as uh america had been officially neutral in the war but had been financing the whole thing american banks loaned uh the allied nations primarily france and britain also a bit russia uh 2.3 billion which back then is oh yeah to fund the war effort the americans are also selling everything from munitions to mutton to the allies like anything the they basically industrialize they're the industrial powerhouse for the entire allied war effort they would have liked to do business with the germans but the british had blockaded the north sea and the channel so they physically couldn't get there

or they would have probably also had people trading with them as well i guess that's for the best because it sounds like we're already about to starve yeah i think if you start selling them everything that they need as well then we're in a lot more trouble yeah they did make token loans to germany throughout the war but it was only 27 million i say only 27 million but relative that's a lot of money already and again adjusted for how much that was worth at the time that's crazy money oh yeah america went from financier and industrial based active participant in early april 1917 for a number of reasons one was the germans decision to start indiscriminate u-boat operations germany had suspected this would bring america into the war because they're sinking

american ships losing american lives but the calculation germany made was we can starve out the british before the americans can get troops across the atlantic in any numbers to make a difference oh so they're hoping that they've already got rid of us so they're not going to be fighting both yeah also yeah you've made a miscalculation there because notoriously sinking American boats gets them into a world war. That's happened both times now. Yeah, well the thing that's put the U-boats

on pause before they kicked things back up is they sank a ship called the Lusitania which had like 124 Americans on board so obviously America were like you've killed a hundred men you've killed a hundred of our guys but yeah they

so the Germans at this point are like we've got to race against time I think their thing is if we can take Britain and France and then we can negotiate with America because America would have to do a trans Atlantic war against a unified

European stronghold at that point Another factor in them getting involved is the fact Britain and France have loaned all this money and if they lose America is not getting that money

back. Yeah I don't imagine germany's gonna foot the bill no so they need to protect that investment or it'll cause a huge economic collapse in america as well as the one europe's facing i we only paid the world war one debt we had back do you want to guess what year we paid it back in this is going to be recent i'm gonna go 2011 close 2015 wow yeah so real recent we paid off 1.9 billion from the principal so how much were we paying a year uh i think it was five percent up until the great depression in the 30s and then it went to 3.5 percent but i think over the lifetime of it they paid like eight nearly nine billion that's so much yeah that's a long ass debt yeah and the final fact

that we're going to cover for bringing them in the war is the zimmerman cable uh which is there's a german uh foreign minister arthur zimmerman he transmits a mission a message from berlin uh via us um the u.s cable system uh because they couldn't use their own because as soon as the war started in 1914 britain just went and cut all of the transatlantic german communication lines so as you do that's a good thing to do so the germans have been having to use the communication networks of neutral countries okay america at that point but obviously encrypting the stuff going through it but they were using that like infrastructure yes yeah so this message got sent through the cables uh and one of the places those cables went was through a island in north of

scotland i think it is and the british intelligence had tapped that wire so they could spy on every single thing that went through it of course and they had their own so they pick up this uh message and it's encoded and it gets sent uh somewhere called uh room 40 which is their signals intelligence thing at the end this was like the precursor of bletchley park okay cool it's literally called room 40 because it was one room and it was room 40 in the building i mean yeah i guess you don't need to over complicate the name just stick it to the room designation so what the the contents of this message was the germans promised mexico control of arizona texas and new mexico if the mexicans attacked the u.s from the south to stop them getting involved in

europe what i didn't know about this this is crazy yeah so germany basically trying to get mexico to declare war on the usa and saying we'll back your claims on like basically the american south that's insane that's a bold play yeah mexico go go start a war with the us we'll get you arizona yeah but the british have a problem here because they've got a highly inflammatory highly inflammatory piece of intelligence that can seal americans entry into the war on their side but they've got it by spying on american communications so they've got this thing and they like cannot they can't give it to the americans because they'd have to admit they were spying on them so what they do is come up with a cunning plan so once the uh telegram

arrives in america it would be re-encrypted into an older code and sent to mexico city by a commercial telegraph company so a british agent in mexico goes and bribes a telegraph office worker to get him the message he knows is coming that'll be in a weaker code they could justify having broken what a convoluted way to get around spying on someone well this is actually the thing about military intelligence is you always have to do this like wacky shit because otherwise it like gives off that you've got the intelligence yeah you have to have plausible deniability the whole time and be like oh look it just fell into your lap it's like how the germans fought britain had way more planes in the uh mediterranean scouting than they did because

the british would break enigma and be like right there's gonna be a convoy coming through here send a plane and the pilots wouldn't even know they'd be told like go and scout out this route and that them knowing there'd be a convoy there the convoy would spot the plane radio and be like we've been spotted and then the stuff that was probably already on the way could then attack the convoy with like denial plausible deniability you'd really be picking up that pilot's ego as well because it's like every time i go out i'm always finding something i'm incredible i'm like the luckiest pilot out here uh so yeah they get this decoded message and they finally go and give it to the u.s and the u.s are able to confirm it in the telegraph office so and that combined with

the u-boat crisis and america's need to defend its investment uh led to them officially joining the war on april 6 1917 we'll pick that up next time but this makes me paranoid that at some point in my life i've thought i've accomplished something but it's actually just a way for spies to pass on information i don't know if they have to be that careful anymore they can just be like yeah there's a global panopticon and we're using it that's a good point everything is under surveillance constantly yeah they're gonna just be like wait how did you find this out they'll be like oh facebook told me yeah an algorithm you opted into being spied on when you bought your phone so i guess i'm allowed to know i don't have to be pretend anymore and then we set up a shit

lot of flock cameras so yeah you don't have to hide it anymore but yeah that's it for the history segment a bit of a british food situation and rationing and then why the americans get involved classic government bread that's all it is please call me government mr bread's my dad's name oh andy it's it's been a long day it has it's been it's it's been i think one of the most exhausting days of my life and i think i as much as i'd love to have played the game today i think maybe it's a good job we haven't played the game because it would have been soul crushing and days like this over the next 40 or so years when they roll around are going to be a real gauntlet yes that i'm gonna have to push on through we have a few days like this where we've really come into

it like but this is one where i'm glad the game we're in a slight hiatus yeah one of the few occasions where we can where we don't have to play the game i mean this is it after the hiatus is over we'll never have a day like this again where we can show up exhausted and then not have to play the game we'll just have to power through yeah it's not it's not great so with that thought in mind andy i'm gonna i'm gonna ask something of you yes and i'm gonna ask it calmly and nicely we need to come together now we need we need to unite and we need a brace for those days we need to set precedent for the days ahead and i'm gonna hand you the reins so that you can do so through some common ground okay 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 so common ground is the segment uh famous and patented segment in which we come together at the end of what would usually be a play session of the campaign for north africa and we unite again as friends to make sure we continue doing this as buddies throughout the whole thing and I guess same thing applies now

we need to come together I need to feel like I belong since you told me I can't wring out my sweaty t-shirt on your sofa because I think part of me died at some point over the last 24 hours so Andy, what is your common ground? Okay, this has been a new theme

for the last few weeks but it's finally made its way into common ground Time zones okay i want to get rid of them right you want to get rid of all time zones yes that's that's interesting um how's how's that gonna work buddy people just you just get used to being like i wake up at 10 p.m and i go to work when it's sunny for seven hours and then i come home 5 a.m and then you just get used to it okay i guess like for example the southern hemisphere the seasons are flipped right yeah yeah they haven't like freaked out and made a new calendar that you have to

convert months through so december's still snowy or whatever they've just got on with it yeah no i'll give you that um so i'm gonna have to ask you a question i don't know if you've prepared for this one you may well have who gets who gets the normal hours the line that has the most people living on it when we do this okay okay i think that's the fairest way to do it so you're probably looking for some kind of competition it always comes down to a fucking competition why is everything just a board game or a some sort of athletic sport why does it always boil down to a game. So I guess we'll just do the line with the most people. Please. Please

for simplicity's sake. Yeah, they just become zero. So it's going to be like India or China, I would imagine. Yeah. It's going to be a slice of the world around those parts where there's crazy dense population centers. Yeah, we had our go with GMT. We're not there. We don't need to be the

center anymore. Are we the center? Well, yeah, they move forward and backward from us. I guess, yeah. It was set up by the bridge yeah we did do that a lot so yeah maybe it is nice that we hand off and let somebody else have a go yeah and then you get no time zone confusion at all and i think it would be pretty quick before people just adapt to

yeah there's got to be a problem with this you don't have to worry about time zones for like getting in touch with people because the world's more global now you don't have to worry about uh daylight savings time no the thing is with time zones though andy that that doesn't it doesn't change when people are awake everyone's still awake at the same time they would be getting in touch with people that doesn't make it this isn't easier no but when you're getting in touch with someone like when we were getting in touch with cam we had a bit of a confusion because he was he did gmt but we were in british summertime but also you had to work out like

oh it was like an 8 hour difference we could have just been like we'll do it at 4am which would have been but then every time we did record it and we just got used to it right okay I found the flaw what's that

so you're gonna call you mentioned before you've got some family in America you're gonna call someone you're gonna call a relative in America and you are trying to figure out when is the best time to call them yeah and what what do you do from there well they'd be like well i'm free from like no no because because it's one thing for them to tell you but this is what do you mean that's required when you're setting up a call with anyone if you're setting it up okay maybe maybe i've made this a bit too too easy i guess when

it's anyone that you're trying to get in touch with where you don't have the direct line of communication where you're having to to use this rule this system that you put in place so they can't just tell you so you're trying to schedule something for another country whether it's contacting someone or traveling sure so what what's your first step to do so i mean i could get this one so confusing what do you mean i don't have a clear way to contact them so you you you go to you go to check you know well when i'm gonna like you're going on holiday okay so so you're going on holiday you want to figure out when you're getting there yeah so what do you do do you search it online and you go you know when when will i be getting there

what's what's the relative difference i guess and then how do you measure that because you say all right let's have a look um and you're gonna get there and it's gonna be you know the travel time to america is what like five six hours maybe and you see you see you're gonna get there at 4 okay that's the time now what does that mean to you it's 4 a.m yes but it's 4 a.m everywhere in the world but it'll be sunny there and it won't be all vice versa how will you know it's going to be sunny there i'll know what you're going to memorize the the weather or i'll look it up and when you look it up what's it gonna say it's gonna say daylight hours between 7 p.m and 10 a.m okay oh that's

when we'll go do stuff and that's a broad range of time yeah so what you're gonna have to then do is disseminate that into okay so this is like the first hour of daylight of that day so it's 7 a.m so you've created time zones still it's the same thing what i'm getting at is for you to measure it at all meaningfully you just create a time zone because then you look at it and go all right so at this point it's the first hour of daylight it's fucking 7 a.m it doesn't change you've got no way to measure it other than what part of the day it is it's just it's the same thing you haven't changed anything you act like this is a bewildering scenario i'm positioning to you no it's it's what we do now that's why they do it now as as i was thinking about this and you were saying it

and and you're bewilderment because you don't know it any other way and you're not just because it's the way it's always been doesn't mean we can't it'll just be it'll just be easier no because you're not going to have encyclopedic knowledge that in india uh you know 9 p.m is when the sun rises what time is it in india right now it's half 9 here. What time is it in India now? I don't know. How would you find that out? It would be the difference between time zones.

And how would you find that out? You would Google it. So both systems require looking things up or knowing a lot of stuff. Yes, but the thing is yours doesn't change anything because it's always going to be relative to what part of the day it is. No, it's not

relative. It's absolute. Because it will be essentially 7am there if it's early morning. so at that point just fucking call it 7 a.m still you're stuck in a very time zone centric mindset yes so are you you haven't realized it you're delusional man you're insane no better right you're better idea come on go okay so we get rid of all the time zones yeah so we're now also doing this is just a general time one right everyone in the world is now doing year, month, day

for the date format. I don't care about any of the others. They're wrong. Yeah, month, day. So it's like 2026 August and then date. Yeah, when you're writing it down.

Why are you starting with the year? So they're always in order when you have entries on it like that. And also you just keep going as you get smaller. year's the biggest one and then you can have like

hours, minutes, seconds they're all going the right way rather than like day, month, year and then hour that doesn't make any sense who the fuck is writing down the date and the hour people are con- what do you mean who's writing down the date

sorry, when you date something no, writing down the date, yeah why are you writing the hour and the minutes and the seconds because then it might be something that's not just an hour or just a day. A day is a very large unit of measurement for

time. If you're measuring something that granularly, you don't need the fucking year in it. What if you were like something happened at 8pm on the 5th of August 1986? Yeah, but in what context?

Because I presume... Recording a day! But presumably this, so this is some event that happened on that specific day. You're probably reading about it, I don't know, in a book that's about this event or it's a web article and you're already on the article for that day

and then it's like at 8am on this day Do you never have like a file with a date in it? Not really Like draft dash and then the date the draft was made I guess so, yeah So they are not in order

if you order them by text Day, month, year yeah do it day month yeah so where does the first and the tenth because

currently it goes first tenth eleventh whatever second if you order it like that what are you talking about first second what what are you quantifying here time

what do you mean time this is you're acting like you don't write the date down or like have it in the name of things or like order things by the date yeah and if I'm writing the date it would be like you know 5th of November 2026

okay what is wrong with that okay can I go back to my example okay okay so you're listing them and you go list these alphabetically right why am I listing the dates alphabetically that's how names a list this is what do you mean names so annoying what do you mean names

are you talking about chronologically yes because you said alphabetically yes because they things don't get sorted chronologically inherently you have to do it and it's not you could just order alphabetically and it would be chronologically no it wouldn't my system would for for years i guess it would and then months and then days okay so you're not right hours and then minutes and then seconds so you're never writing out the the month you're only writing down the digit for the month yeah number the numerical value of the month yes that's the date format thing yeah why why are you filtering stuff like that because i work in right okay so this is to make your job easier yes okay because i work just say that man

just say you want to make your job easier people write dates into forms in a bunch of fucking dumb different ways and then you have to order them but they've entered them as text and it's a fucking nightmare and if you just do your month day it just all works okay right this makes you don't have to do a bunch of bullshit this makes so much more sense now you've had like a bad day at work and you're you're using this this is a continued gripe no it's okay man i i do this all the time with common ground that's i think exclusively what i use it for at this point okay i just want you to to vindicate me on something that's annoyed me so i i get this and the time zones thing i think you know i know you're an intelligent guy something clearly went wrong there

but the date thing i don't it's not going to bother me too much to do it this way i'll i i like the way that it is now i like day month yeah but if this is going to make your job easier and it means causing a little bit of chaos in amongst it all by making people change it all that's funny i'll do it buddy okay thank you i'll do that for you i'm willing to i'll take the hit i'll get adjusted to it i'll start writing another date i'll go oh yeah first but i know you're having a good day at work thank you that's generous because this was a very bad common ground that i didn't explain well at any point no you didn't and like i say the time zone one that's moronic and i will not stand for that that's insane i'll come back for that one that

one's fine what do you mean come back i'll you don't get a redo i'll chop it and come back no you don't get to do it again look i'm gonna figure out this time zone thing right if you if you dare come back to a common ground and rehash it if if i don't agree instantly then there's gonna be hell on okay okay i don't know what the consequence will be but it's it's gonna be dire there's gonna be another i'm i'll give your address out that's it you're getting doxxed okay so let that be a cautionary tale as is this thanks for listening guys we're really sorry stay so brave we're losing our minds here in the desert of our minds but we'll get there we just need to start the game until then i've been james i've been andy we'll speak to you next

time please just be careful careful with what you're doing careful with time zones rest it's been so long uh the other thing with the time zone thing we won't get back into it but it would be helpful

when we start doing space travel anyway thanks for listening guys 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 $2,500 during our massive Labor Day event. Hurry into your local Sleep Number store today because we have your number.