The Luke and Pete Show - A friendship of mountains

Episode Date: July 21, 2020

Pete’s been in the wars with a neck injury but luckily he’s now on the road to recovery, which is why we’re bringing you an episode on a Tuesday this week. Apologies for the delay and thank you for your patience! On today’s Luke and Pete Show, we’re talking about American sports and the art of mixing glue. We also have a new player entering the game!What’s more, Luke’s got a surprising fact about the point furthest from the earth’s surface and Pete has a confession to make about using an unusual shower gel substitute. Warning: it’s dark. Plus, we’ve got a shocking email from a listener who accidentally destroyed a 5,000 year old corpse. What more could you ask for?We love hearing from you, so please do get in touch at [e-mail].**Please rate and review us on Apple or wherever you get your podcasts. It means a lot and makes it easy for other people to find us. Thank you!** Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Luke and the Pete show. It is a Tuesday. What the hell is going on, Luke Moore? I don't know, Peter. Let's address the elephant in the room. There's an elephant in both of our rooms. I'm doing very well, very happy to chat to you guys on a Tuesday. It's a break from the old routine, as they say, but we should apologize to our lovely listeners, our lovely loyal listeners, who in there literally, I mean, let's be absolutely clear, about eight people tweeted saying, where's the episode? And so I replied to them, but Pete, you have been, as a 1980s parent would say, in the wars. I have been in the wars. I hurt my shoulder, which turned into a neck thing, which turned into a, Lukey, I can't get out of bed.

I need to lie down. So I couldn't even. I mean, we're recording this remotely due to COVID, and we're just, I could not record a Luke and Pete show. I'm really sorry. I think this is the first one we've missed in ages i mean usually we'd put together a best of uh but i again i i can't reiterate enough i couldn't sit up so um and of course i'm the only one who knows uh where the quality lies in the

so uh well i could have mastered poor old katie but i just thought to myself you know what katie's got a lot of work she's got a routine let's just wait till till today people get it as a Tuesday treat it won't affect the downward numbers because people will get it regardless just get it a day later we'll have a show on Thursday as normal and we'll just simply Pete never speak of this again apart from to say um and I think I speak on behalf of the listeners here as I try to, to try and be the older, the audience surrogate whenever I can. What could have happened to a 38-year-old man's, or 39 now, year-old man's shoulder to have put him in such a bad state? Well, very much like the Michael Jordan of the documentary

Michael Jordan and His Friends, which I believe it's called on Netflix. Yeah, it's called that. I decided at 39 to start a baseball career. Good idea. So I've just been in the nets throwing some balls. The Soho Slammers. Giving the old Charlie

around schmuckle ball and I've done myself a mischief. It's going well though um as long as there's no kind of uh uh union that starts uh that prevents me from actually making the major leagues i'm i'm looking forward to getting started one thing you have learned from this whole foul episode though is that you can't be the pitcher and the batter no no i was kind of throwing it up in the air because i had very limited limited uh resources and very few amount of people to actually play baseball with in central soho because

people just don't want to touch you so i was throwing the ball right up as high as i could running over to where the batter would be and then uh yeah home run baby is that how it goes i thought that that was hockey, wasn't it? I think that sounds a little bit more... Yeah, because they've got big organs, haven't they, at the baseball? Yeah, I think a little bit of both. A little bit of both. Have you ever been to a baseball match, Sherlock? I haven't, no.

I've heard it's all about boozing and all about eating. And that's pretty much it, basically. It's very boring. Very, very boring. I went to see the Atlanta Braves and it was a 0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-1 match. I think I mentioned it before. Oh, yeah, you did actually, yeah.

Just, I mean, come on, lads. Just do something bad or do something good. Just don't be mediocre. No, speaking of baseball and American sports, you know, like in this country, there's a thing about how oh you know when um the nba champions or the nfl champions win the superbar whatever they call themselves the world champions yes some people go oh we have the world champions only americans playing uh and you're like, it is. But have you ever seen any other country, for example,

try and take on the United States at American football? Because there is an international American football world championships every so often, and America win it every single time without even sending any professional players. And that is true. They don't send any professional players because they don't need to or they're not allowed to or they all play in the NFL, so they're contracted not to.

I think they only send college players and they absolutely batter teams all the time. Like, for example, in 2015, the International World American Football Championships, America in the final beat Japan 59-12 with no professional players. I mean, yeah. I mean, it is Japan.

It's a very technical sport, though, and it's not just about... It must be our infrastructure as well, having, like, the technology and the coaching methods and stuff. Well, there are no leagues, or very few leagues, where people are practicing, I guess.

There's a couple of London teams, isn isn't there oh yeah yeah my friend used to be defensive captain for the london blitz but i mean he's i think it's part of their um it's part of their um like kind of training thing or whatever it was i think they went over to the us and seconded with a college team or something they said it's just a standard it's absolutely ridiculous well they practice in finsbury park with all their kit on and it always looks very funny because they're just in finsbury park yeah it feels a bit out of place right yeah massively yeah so i mean the point the point is that like um the the the i think the americans who've entered the american football world champions three times won it three times um they only use

a cross-section of amateur football players so if you're you're ineligible if you're a professional from any us or canada league you must have graduated from college and um you can't um i don't think you can play if you're at currently at college so all they're using is people who weren't good enough to get into the pros who finished college and they're still winning drafted i'm just making the point that like i know they call themselves world champions at certain sports and it does seem a bit arrogant but no one else can get near them and i imagine it's the same for basketball because we've seen the dream team in the olympics and i imagine it's also the same for baseball so don't step to a man

is what i'm saying well well basketball especially not your shoulder love for that i mean i would not go anywhere near a football right now very Very, very agonising, no. People are wondering if you're going to be able to carry on your fledgling quarterback career after that shoulder setback. Look, it's all about getting the right doctors, the right surgeons to

work on it. I'm hoping for a good result and some great rehabilitation. Best doctors in the league. Best doctors in the league. Yeah, exactly. It is a strange sport that I don't really understand. That's most sports for you, though, isn't it? Yeah, soccer. Can I change trains completely and ask you a question?

I've actually been looking forward to asking you for a few days. All right, yeah, go on. So I'm going to ask you something, and I want you to answer it honestly, because when I heard about this, I'd never considered this before. I wouldn't necessarily say it blew my mind, but I found it very, very interesting, and I'm going to try it out on you.

It lit the blue touch paper. It did, yeah. It didn't explode. It's getting there. Exactly. It's like when your science teacher lights that magnesium in the science class. Don't look directly at it. No.

You blind yourself. Okay, so work your way through this mentally and logically answer this question. What do you think on Earth the point farthest from the Earth's centre is? On Earth? Yeah, so

on obviously the surface of the Earth, what do you think the point farthest from Earth's centre is? Machu Picchu. No, that's a mental answer. It's not that mental, but I understand what you mean. So where I'm going with this is that would it be logically fair to suggest that most people would answer the summit of Mount Everest? A tall building.

Oh, right, yeah. A tall building. Fucking a 30-meter... A tall building at elevation, like somewhere high, I would say. Yeah, but I mean, Mount Everest is at 30,000 feet almost. Okay, okay, yeah, that's fair. Okay, this isn't going well, but we'll crack on. Most people would

think it's it's at mount everest right the summer of mount everest but that is the highest point on the earth's surface not the point farthest from the earth's center now the reason for that is because um the earth isn't a perfect sphere it's what's called an oblate spheroid. Okay? So it's wider at the equator and narrower between the poles. Therefore, the summit of Chimborazo in Ecuador, which is only, I think, about 21,000 feet relevant to sea level, so a good 8,000 feet lower than the summit of Mount Everest,

is technically the point farthest from Earth's centre. Ah, that's, I mean, I will never remember that because I know I'm not with trivia, but that's a really, really lovely little fact. And my next question is, should Chimborazo, for that reason, be a bit more better known? I think it should. It should be covered in flags. Have you seen the top of Everest? Somebody took a picture of it recently. It should be covered in flags. Have you seen the top of Everest?

Somebody took a picture of it recently, and it's just covered in flags. It looks disgusting. Full of people, I think. Everyone wants to get a piece of that action now, don't they? Yeah, I don't see the appeal, but then I'm not really that much of a climber

or a doer of anything, really. Yeah, it's almost a bit like, I can get on board with the idea. First of all, by the way, I didn't even know that Chimborazo was the highest mountain in Ecuador. I'd never even heard of it before. But anyway, on the Everest thing, I do get the idea that some people

want to do it because it's hard. And, you know, it was Edmund Hillary when he was asked. I think it was Edmund Hillary. Someone was famously asked, why do you want to climb to the top of Mount Everest? Excuse me. And he said, because it's there, right? Yeah.

I get that kind of feeling and understand the need. I heard it was because he wanted to see down a lady's top. Yeah. That's what, if you read the actual full quote. He's a real pervert. He's a real pervert, Hilary. Look at all the lady's tops you can look down. And then he also said, I think I also might have left my reading glasses up there,

is what he said. And I am not going back to Specsavers for a fourth reading glasses up there is what he said and i am not going back to spec savers for a fourth time this year that's what he said um so but the thing is like like um it's not something that i that kind of gets me up in the morning you know i mean some people just love it they're driven by doing all these extreme things like that guy that sas tv show who makes all those apologies on tv because he says the wrong thing all the time. He obviously is one of those people who just needs to do something. Do you know what I mean? I think

those sort of people, they get up in the morning and they go down to Joe and the Juice and they get their juice and they get their little avocado sandwich. I don't think Anthony Middleton of SAS Who Does wins eats an avocado sandwich in the morning. I think he has about five steaks. Do you reckon?

What, do you reckon he goes into his garden and hunts a fox, strips it? Yeah. I've stripped a fox. Fox steak. I don't know. Tiny, tiny little thing. Absolute garbage animal.

Yeah. What were you going to say? So he goes down and he gets his avocado. I just think he probably wears some sandals, but with glass in it, just to make it a little bit harder. Yeah, just to train his gums. I do a lot of announcements for Discovery Channel shows where it's...

Who's the guy? Who's the survivalist? He sort of talks like this. He's always getting hydrated. Bear Grylls? Bear Grylls. How did I get that from that impression? the survivalist um he sort of talks like this he's always getting hydrated bear grills bear grills he's always how do i get that from that impression it was a great impression gotta stay hydrated i'm drinking my own piss yeah uh yeah he's uh he sort of goes around um if he's not taking a friend up a mountain he is trying to recreate failed like people who've got into

incredibly difficult circumstances like uh they've got caught in a frozen on the frozen tundra so he'll go and he'll basically copy what they what they what they've done and try and get out of it with a camera crew uh and with all all the perks that comes along with that. Didn't he once get... I want to be careful here because I don't want to get us in legal trouble, not again. But didn't he once kind of get outed as being in some hotel or something? A hotel, wasn't it?

While making a show. But was that just people misunderstanding how a TV show is made? Yes, yes, I think so. I think more than anything, I think the illusion or the, people thought that he was in a hotel abroad, but behind him,

you could see clearly a British plug, which is only used here. And I think sometimes in Hong Kong. Yeah. I'm just looking up here. It says on the show, man versus wild, the show caused controversy after a program consultant

he's fucking, he's dobbed him in revealed that Grylls actually stayed in a hotel some nights, including an episode in Hawaii, which he was ostensibly stranded on a deserted island and at certain stages scenes were staged for him. Grylls subsequently apologized to viewers

who might have felt misled. I think if you are telling people you're deserted on an island and you're actually staying in a Hawaiian hotel, that is at the thick end of misled, in my opinion. Yeah, but I want to know how much the hotel was. Did he use one of his free nights at Hotels.com? Yeah, true. Was it not technically a hotel he paid for?

Maybe he'd broken into the hotel maybe maybe he was in the hotel but he only slept on the carpeted floor and refused any food yes exactly i would rather stay on a deserted island in hawaii than stay at for example an ibis um yeah uh was it was the ibis i stayed in uh portsmouth uh that time yeah that's depressing that story i don't know's depressing, that story. I don't know why you tell that story. I think about it a lot. It was a dark night in my life.

I don't have many dark nights. That's not true. Batman style. But no, I really don't. But that was one of my bad ones. One of my bad ones. Why were you doing that? You could just stay with my parents.

They'd bloody love to have you stay. I hate staying with anybody because I don't like being in a position. That's true. I prefer to sort of stay, just pay my money than I need to. But you were down there visiting a friend and you decided to stay in the Portsmouth Ibis. I think there's some lovely little guest houses in old Portsmouth you could have stayed in. They wouldn't have been that expensive, you know. It wasn't even Portsmouth.

It was Fratton. Oh, my know. It wasn't even Portsmouth. It was Fratton. Oh, my goodness. Well, that is Portsmouth, but it's one of the more difficult parts of Portsmouth. Yeah, it was not great work enough. But look, we live and learn. We live and learn. I've been to good Ibises. I've gone to bad Ibises.

Is it Ibis or Ibis? Yeah, that's it. Is it Ibis or Ibis? Yeah, I think that people get very much confused with the, what's it called, the animal that parades around the savannah, the Ibix. Yes. I think they're cross-referencing it to Ibis. It could well be Ibis, but then if it's going to be Ibis, it would probably have two Bs.

I had a lecturer at college called Trevor Ibbotson, and he was two Bs, so had a lecturer at college called Trevor Ibbotson, and he was two Bs. So I think it probably is Ibis. I'm glad we've cleaned that up. Honestly, before we go to a break, Pete, can I just also say that in even more bizarre circumstances, Chimborazo, who we've learned obviously earlier in the show is the farthest point away from the Earth's surface,

technically its summit is therefore at a higher point than the summit of Mount Everest. It's only the 39th highest peak in its own range, the Andes. Unreal. The world continues to impress and surprise. It's smaller than even its friends. That's so weird. Yeah.

Some of its friends, anyway, like me. I feel like Chimbratsa. Yeah. A friendship of mountains. Wouldn't that be lovely instead of a mountain range? I mean, a friendship of mountains. That's lovely. That'd be really nice.

I think we should come up with alternative kind of collective nouns and stuff. It'd be really heartwarming when you're stuck on one of them, freezing to death. This mountain has not been a friend to me. No, an enemy of the mountain. As my fingers fall off. Yeah. All right, then. Shall we take a short break and be back with some emails?

Because we just never get through enough emails, Luke. True. They're just getting better and better. I agree. All right, then. We'll be back in a second. Jack Mate's Happy Hour is back for a brand new season. It's the podcast where we talk to some of the most exciting people in the world

from Ricky Gervais. In some ways, fame makes you a better person. You know, it's like I don't believe in God. I don't believe in God's watching me. But I know someone with a funny face. To undercover police officers. Can you see the fading scar there, gentlemen? Yes.

That's where I was stabbed in the neck by a drug dealer once. Or we just talk about whatever's making us laugh right now. When you think back to school kid banter, like, it's well funny because of how immature it is. We had this teacher called Mr. McGibbon, and he had this big cushion

that he was teaching us how to rugby tackle on. He just ran up to it, rugby tackled it, but landed on top of it. And one of the kids shouted, it's not your wife, sir. That is funny. Listen to Jack Makes Happy Hour on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your pods.

Jack Makes Happy Hour is a Stakhanov production. And we are back. This is the Luke and Pete show. I do hope you enjoyed that advertorial sojourn, but we are back and it is a Tuesday. We're sorry about that. We're not sorry about it being Tuesday, but we're sorry that we didn't bring you a show yesterday.

Tuesday, I think, is probably the most nondescript of the days, though. I mean, Monday, you're on a kicker from the weekend, and you can't ask Monday. Monday's got a clear identity. Wednesday is obviously the peak of the week. Thursday, you can probably treat yourself. In normal times, you'd be able to treat yourself to a Thursday night beer, knowing that it's Friday the next day.

And then, obviously obviously Friday is Friday. So Tuesday is probably the one that hasn't got an identity, I would say. Yeah. Friday I'm in love. Friday I am in love. Two things. The best generic battery brand name ever,

according to Ray Dixon. This is something that we sort of started the show a couple of years ago. First of all, Ray Dixon? Yeah. Sounds like a cool detective has he emailed us from his local

provincial grocery store in the 1970s he sounds like I think he sounds like a detective I really do yeah

or maybe like a carpet salesman he's found a in a kids toy he's found a new battery Dickie Power you having a bit of that

yeah I think a new player might have entered the game Dickie Power I've never heard of it. Yeah. I have heard of it. I have heard of it.

Dickie Bird of it. Incredible. Does he provide any context about where he found said battery? He's found it in some cheap kid's toy. A terrible battery

with a preposterously short life. But look, it's Dickie Power. Trust in Dickie. For me, it's clear and evident that manufacturers of electronics will deliver. If Luke and Pete shows one thing over the years, they will deliver the worst battery they can get away with

just to get it off the shelf. They aren't putting a full power Duracell in there, are they? No, no. And you rarely see that. You will occasionally see a Panasonic if it's a Panasonic product. But other than that, yeah, or a Sony. But you're getting nothing better than a Dickie Power usually. So, yeah, unlucky.

I wonder, Pete, is it the case that a lot of these, so, for example, Is it the case that a lot of these, so for example, your Dickie Powers, perhaps not your Sonys or your Panasonics, but your Dickie Powers, your other kind of new leaders, your GP Ultras, are they all just the same battery rebars, do you think? Yeah, same technology, same nonsense. It's been such a long time since we talked about batteries. I think we found out about GP Power, where that came from.

But yeah, they're pretty much the same, aren't they? Same factory, just different branding. But like a very top of the range kind of Duracell and a top of the range EverReady or whatever, they're going to be distinctive individual products. Is that right? I mean, I'm not an expert by any means. You are. You're much better at me at

the meal they probably have they probably have a bit more uh you know self-respect i would say if you're in shenzhen or wherever the hell uh dickie power gets made um which is just a weird name to use um dickie power gets made in ray dixon's grocery store in camberley and surrey by the sound of it. But imagine if you're having like a, if you're in like an assembly line and you're sort of, I don't, I presume everything's done automatically when it comes to batteries.

So it's very, very heavy metals and you know, they're just, it's just bits of sort of paper wrapped in metal, isn't it? And then in, you know, jammed into a tube.

Would you be annoyed Pete, if you shell, if you pass your driving test, shelled out for a top-of-the-range Tesla, whipped up the carpet in the bottom of the car and just saw a load of dicky powers all over the shop? I don't care. Look, if it goes forward, I don't care.

Look, at the best of times, cars just confuse me. I don't really know what they mean or how they work. Didn't you have a driving lesson the other day? No, I was in a car that someone let me have a go on. It turns out I can't really remember much from my driving lesson. Don't say that to the police officer. Just went around the car park. I mean, we spoke about this on Friday's show before the ramble.

I mean, why cars need gears at this point in our lives? We've perfected the idea of a computer. So let's just get computers to do the gear changes, shall we? Yeah, well, I think the good people at Google agree with you, mate. Good. We'll be all in the world of iRobot. I know that. Yeah, exactly, before long.

Hello at LukeandPeteShow.com is the email address to get in touch with us on and another person that's done that is our good friend tom who says uh morning luke and for some reason pete he's called you judge eyes judge eyes that's a video game it may be a reference to the abram japan podcast because right video game called judge eyes it's a sequel to the uh yakuza series which i'm very fond of uh but obviously it's a it podcast because there's a video game called Judge Eyes. It's a sequel to the Yakuza series, which I'm very fond of. But obviously it's a Japanese name that sounds really weird in the West.

Judge Eyes. How many other men do you talk to? A couple, just a couple. Okay. Anyway, Tom says he was interested in our conversation about archaeology and he thought he'd contribute a few personal anecdotes. So I'll let Tom take up the story now he says firstly let me say that after

studying archaeology for four years it shocked me how most archaeologists tend to have a pretty blasé attitude to their job the best first-hand example i have of this was when i was part of a group excavating a causewayed enclosure monument down in wiltshire so think similar to the outer ring of stonehenge uh towards the end of our week there uh one of my colleagues armed with a pickaxe was widening out an existing trench and listen if any of you have watched time team widening trenches is all part of the fun um and it was located at the mouth of the causeway, says Tom. About one hour after he started, he came to our excavation leader and in a nervous voice asked us all to come and confirm something for him. The long and short of this story is that he had come across

some bone fragments that he assumed were animal and kept smashing away and destroying them in the process only stopped when he unearthed a distinctly human looking tibia turns out the skeletal remains dated between four and a half and five thousand years ago was that of a teenage girl that had been bound and buried in the opening of the causeway perhaps in a sacrificial ritual this was a major find and he had destroyed the thing from the knees down. Nobody cared, though, and he was roundly congratulated and plied with drinks all night.

For smashing up a corpse. Yeah. He said, also, one of my former lecturers was in Syria in the summer of 2014 and had to flee under armed escort while being chased by ISIS through the desert. Safe to say he was shaken up by the experience but has since returned and continued his work despite the civil war that still rages on yeah obviously a very sad story um but that this this story of the uh of the um the

teenage uh girls remains from almost 5 000 years ago is a fascinating one chiefly because obviously it's just fascinating and that part of the world is great for that kind of thing i mean there's all sorts going on down there as stonehenge would attest to but like it's interesting to me pete because when you're a kid and someone says to you what do you want to be when you grow up right you might say doctor or astronaut or whatever yeah pilot or if you're a particularly precocious child um with very very middle-class parents who think you're the center of the world you might say archaeologist right the point about what i'm making here is that in that it's sort of implicitly contained within that is the idea that those professions all know exactly what they're doing yeah when i when i'm

a pilot or an astronaut or an archaeologist i'll know exactly about what's going on no one knows what's going on if you're listening to this and you're under the age of like 25 don't worry about getting to the point where you think you've worked everything out because no one ever does it's all a massive bluff yeah and that guy just smashed up a corpse with presumably some kind of pickaxe so like yeah i completely agree no everyone is just bluffing it fake it till you make it smash it till you uh can put it back together with glue presumably yeah that would be you yeah what are you doing down there pete it's fucking one in the morning

nothing why can i smell um what's that what's that glue pete araldite why can i just smell araldite all the time do you remember that glue you had to mix yourself um i remember there's fish glue at school but i remember like there was a like a metallic glue that my dad used to use it used to come in a orange and a black uh kind of packet and you mix it together it was sort of bright and shiny metallic and it was incredible stuff that's interesting i don't remember that but i do remember my dad i do remember having like the glue you got to use at class at school but my dad using a certain type of glue that you had to mix yourself and i think it might have been called araldite and yeah yeah and i don't know why that existed i mean why is it is the idea that it's such industrial strength

glue that you just have to mix it yourself because it's too dangerous otherwise i mean to me it feels like you're you're kind of injecting some some danger into the process by asking probably a quite hapless dad on most occasions to mix his own glue some ceremony to it i suppose yeah i mean i guess it was maybe just if it stays in the uh if it stays in the bottle for too long it just gets too uh too hard hard if it was the final solution, so to speak. That's not a sentence I need to use. But, yeah, you've got a mix of the two. It's a helpful phrase.

Have I ever told you my Swarovski story, Pete? No, don't you have? But have I told you my recent Swarovski story where I ran out of shower gel and had to use Swarovski? I'm not proud. Now, that that I mean you tell me you don't have

any dark nights yeah I mean where's that come from that's a dark morning anyway let's get out of here let's get out of here because we've run out of time

we'll be back later in the week for Thursday's episode do email us in show at sorry hello at lukeandpete show dot com

for anything that's piqued your interest over these last few shows. We'd love to hear from you. We'll be back on Thursday with yet more of this nonsense. Thank you very much. Have a great week. Enjoy the weather.

It's supposed to be lovely, but make sure you wear sunscreen. this was a staccato production