The Luke and Pete Show - Pete angers someone

Episode Date: June 11, 2020

It’s an email special! Today we’re reading a whole load of emails from you lot, including one from a man who has had a particularly unfortunate experience in a public toilet, and one from a disgruntled gamer who has a bone to pick with Pete.Also on today’s ep, a listener has got in touch with a list of times this show has predicted the future, we’ve got some mind boggling maths, some grievances with online quizzing, and we’re discussing the development of glass. Again. Keep the emails rolling in at [e-mail]! ***Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or your preferred podcast provider. It means a great deal to the show and will make it easier for other potential listeners to find us. Thanks!*** Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

welcome back to the luke and pete show my name is pete donaldson and i'm luke moore welcome into our uh cave of shite something i didn't mention coming live from the cave of shite great exactly um we were um we were talking about space the final frontier etc uh earlier on this week on monday's show uh i uh neglected to mention that i was um involved in a uh family pub quiz situation i know a lot of you have also been doing quizzes yeah the lockdown period um not my family someone else's family that's very clear and yeah i was doing a pub quiz and um one of the questions was um what is the name of a 1981 space mission slash shuttle um that um was named after a south american country and i went right

that can't be what i think i'm think I'm thinking because it is a completely different spelling. And I would like to take the time now on Thursday to air my grievances about the fact it's not named after Columbia, the country. It is named after, I believe, the river or a ship that was on that river that resides in the north of America. I was very upset about that, Luke, because that lost me a point. Yeah, it is really frustrating when when

especially if you're a pedant like me, when you get questions asked and you know the answer but the question asker himself doesn't quite know it or the question itself is worded in quite a vague fashion. It kind of makes me, it sends

my anxiety up actually when that happened so you must have been i mean who were you doing this with your friend's family or something so you're in a position you couldn't really pipe up didn't feel like i had the we had people from uh who was who were dialing in from italy we had people from hartlepool and the surrounding area so yeah i didn't feel like i could kind of, you know, do a David Brent and get annoyed about it. Yeah, you'd go home and get a book. Mr Spock is half human, half Vulcan. Yeah, disappointing.

So did that ruin your weekend? Did you win the quiz in the end? No, we came second to a boy whose birthday it was. Oh, what? What sort of Mickey Mouse jamboree are they running here? Joke, absolute joke. On the Sabbath as well. Pete, I mean, what I would have done is I would have tried really hard to win

so it wouldn't have mattered. Those kind of injustices, they play in my mind. You're like Michael Jordan in that documentary where he'll make up a slight that never happens so it'll fire him up enough to win a basketball match. He sounds, the deeper i get into this bloody documentary he sounds madder and madder and even then the documentary was fact-checked and and basically you know gone over with a fine-tooth comb by michael jordan and his people themselves so yeah to put him in the best light and he still looks like a madman different breed

though isn't it i mean what the thing sporting excellence, it turns you into a maniac. Being an incredibly gifted artist on the basketball court or football field, I genuinely think you can't be a normal person and be a born winner. You just can't be. I'll be really interested in your take on it because when I watched the documentary, I've seen it all in its entirety, and for those who don't know

or those who have been living under a rock or whatever and we will get to your emails because we said this would be an email special um but just get this done first for those who don't know we're talking about the last dance right about michael jordan and the chicago bulls in the 90s and their final season and there was a lot of not necessarily i think it would be unfair to call it backlash but i think a lot of surprise and certainly a lot of, not necessarily, I think it would be unfair to call it backlash, but I think a lot of surprise and certainly a lot of chat around the way Michael Jordan particularly behaved among his colleagues and his teammates and the franchise in general, just because he wanted to win so bad. And a lot of people have said, you know, through the lens of 2020, would this behavior be acceptable? And I have to admit, my first response to that was and i suppose still

is well what do you fucking expect i mean he ain't yeah he isn't gonna be the kind of guy who is gonna get you to the way he got those i mean not not necessarily on his own but certainly made a huge huge contribution by just being like oh don't worry about it and and don't forget a lot of it was based around the idea that if you're a young rookie or you're a problematic character and you're not going to dedicate yourself the way he is and you're not going to turn up on time and you're not going to practice hard, et cetera, et cetera, you're going to get dug out for that.

And I didn't even necessarily see, and I won't spoiler it for you if you haven't seen all of it, but I didn't necessarily see his teammates who were being interviewed today about that time even really complaining about it. None of them complained about it. They were just like, oh, it's just how it was. And looking back on it, maybe it was a bit harsh,

but I never would have got where I wanted to get if it wasn't for that. No, I mean, when he punches that small player on the... But he punched him back. Well, he started it by pushing him. He punched him in the chest and then Michael Jordan punched him and he said, oh, I hit the smallest player on the team. And it's like, because you don't

see much of that guy on the field, I'm sort of going, what was his job? If he was that short he shouldn't have been anywhere near basketball. He's a legend by the way, Steve Kerr. He's coached the Golden State Warriors. He's done so much in basketball, you know. Yeah, he definitely looked more like a coach. I enjoyed the documentary immensely

because I have no idea about basketball. I've never even seen a match before. I don't know if I really... Didn't Steve Kerr, didn't Steve Kerr come across as an amazing guy though? He seemed really,

really sound. Yeah, he seemed pretty, pretty, pretty leather-headed. I think everyone did. Magic Johnson sounds like a really nice chap. Is he a really nice chap? Has he got some shit

that I'll say that he's brilliant and lovely? The problem with saying, I'll use the WrestleMe thing, where we were talking about, I think he's a Mexican wrestler, Alberto Del Rio. We were talking about how good he was in the WrestleManias that we watched, and then last week he was arrested. I think he's in prison again.

He's arrested once again for doing something terrible. It just seems like it's very hard to review something that's 10 years old because in that time someone will have done something dreadful that you just don't want to fucking think about. I fell foul

of it during Last Dance. Similar to you, not really having any kind of knowledge about the subject, no real basis and knowledge of the subject. And I think I tweeted at one point a certain player who seemed really cool in the interview and got bombarded with replies because that man was a rapist.

So I had no clue. I mean, you don't have any idea or any knowledge really, do you? But I found the whole thing. I mean, the coolest guy in the whole thing was Phil Jackson, I thought. clue i mean it's just you don't have any idea or any knowledge really do you so um but but i found the whole thing i mean the coolest guy in the whole thing was phil jackson i thought yeah he's quite he's just i just like how long he is all of these men look all of these all of these men especially when they get a bit older they get a bit um you know their face gets a bit rounder and a bit fuller and you sort of like oh he look he looks pretty uh pretty lovely and then in in in their in their previous lives as basketball players you're like how are they so long they don't look long now like they must it must be such a surprise if you see someone

in a coffee shop that's like sitting down having a cup of tea or whatever and then they stand up to be like six foot five and go from a sitting position it It's just the worst. Well, I'm six three, Pete. I mean, I can give you a bit of insight. Oh, gross. Gross. I don't even want to think of it. Yeah, but imagine you, but like three or four inches taller and really thin as well.

It's bizarre. Bizarre physically. I can't get with. Vicious. No, but like really, like you're quite broad-shouldered. So like there's no, they're lighter than you. Like it's weird. I don't get it.

I don't get it. I don't understand. It's a brilliant documentary though, isn't it, anyway? It's really well done. Oh, it's smashing. The footage I've got is wicked. Some of the moving back and forward is a bit confusing. I'm like, what year am I in?

Yeah, it's a bit, yeah, because the thing is like, it's really fine when you're watching something and it's set in 1996, and then it scrolls back to 1910. You can get that, right? This one's like 1997. Oh, let's scroll all the way back to summer 1995. It's not really that different, is it? So for those of us who don't know anything about basketball,

we might need to think about that a little bit more. I'm trying to look at the bus that they're on. Is that the old bus or the new bus has anyone got a mobile phone in their hand what was um somebody um that i know tweeted that his um in a slightly uh poor way in my opinion um so my missus uh said that uh my missus said that uh asked whether when you get on a coach as a footballer do you get get dropped off at your house or do you get dropped off somewhere else after you've played a football match? Like say Arsenal go to, I don't know, Stoke or something

and then they drive back to Arsenal. Does everyone get dropped off at the stadium and everyone picks up their cars? Yeah, I believe so, yeah. Or do you get, yeah. So I imagine that's the case. But like, is Mr. Sotov asked, like, could you not just drop people off on the way?

Like, do they not get dropped off on the way? And I was thinking- Oh, let us out. Why? Well, like, because I used to live in Holloway Road and I used to get a train back from up north and it would go straight past my house and go to King's Cross.

And I'd have to get, like, you know, travel another, like, half an hour back up the line, effectively. But I could see my house from the train as it rattled through into London. I'd be like, oh, for crying out, could they not just let me out here? So I'm thinking, like, why wouldn't you?

If your house was on the way, why couldn't you just get let out and just walk to your house? So I read a story, Pete. It might have been in one of those Ben McIntyre books that he does about spies, like those real-life John le Carre books. Yeah. And there's an eccentric guy. I forget who it was exactly.

It doesn't matter. But this eccentric guy is part of the Secret Service, I think. I mean, I might be having the complete wrong end of the stick. But anyway, someone I read about back in the day definitely used to do this, where they would get the train back to their nearest station, but their house and their back garden backed onto the railway line. And apparently this one geezer, like five minutes from getting off at the station, he would

wait for the train to go past his garden and throw his briefcase out the window so it landed in his garden so he didn't have to carry it all the way home. That's amazing. Which is like, by the way, if you can throw it into your garden, it's probably got nothing important in it, which means it's probably quite light, so I don't really know what you're

doing there. Anyway, Pete, let's have a break. Let's have a break and come back and do some emails because we didn't do any at all on monday all right and we're back with the luke and the peach show it's a thursday so we're going to be filling your hungry ears with some delicious emails shall i start luke please do all right we've got from david i don't believe this one for a second hi the luke and the pete i thought i'd share a story to make you both wince. My friend's mum is a nurse, and a couple of years ago, we asked her about some of the worst injuries she had ever seen.

She told us quite a few that made us want to throw up, but there was one that was far worse than any other. She told us that she was on shift one night when a guy was brought in with a severe injury to his man parts. She asked him what had happened, and, gentlemen, gird your loins. And, yeah, this is horrible and after some embarrassment he said that he'd been using a public toilet when he heard a noise in the next cubicle he looked down and saw a glory hole and decidedly uh decided uh stupidly that he would

stick his knob through it unknown to him the guy in the cubicle next to him wasn't there for that he was shooting up heroin and freaked out when he saw strangers penis coming towards him so he did what anyone would do um and shoved the email right through the guy's member. At that moment, the guy who had shoved his penis to the wall instinctively pulled back and, when doing so, his manhood came back through the hole, but the needle didn't, which meant that it split the penis in half-length ways.

Imagine the forked tongue of a snake, says David. After I had stopped feeling faint, I asked her how it all finished up. Fortunately, the guy was able to be sewn up and everything ended up working again as it should, as well as not being infected by the needle i think it's a lesson learned by anyone for everyone though especially pete don't go stick your penis through holes in the wall another fine job by the nhs david i think possibly the friend's mum the friend's nursing mum is has been taken for a ride there because so to speak uh because the man

sticking his penis into the glory hole, he's been up to no good. He can come back with that story saying that he put his penis through a glory hole and a heroin addict jabbed a swim through it. It's not a great cover story, though, is it? I mean, it's not... What could you be doing that's worse than that? I mean, he's probably just tried to do that BME thing where you split your penis into two.

What? The BME, the body modification modification guys i don't think any of this happened i think this is a cool complete bollocks well i think the friend's mum saw the penis being split and people's penises get split lads like putting their penises in weird places so i reckon he just made up a story and that became the story um but i don't buy the knee jerk reaction from an inebriated heroin user is to jab a fucking syringe through a penis, especially when it's valuable heroin, if you're jabbing a syringe

through a penis. That's the thing Pete, I'm telling you now if I put myself in a position whatever I was doing in a public toilet cubicle, I might say I was taking drugs, say I wasn't, but I'm putting myself in that position, I'm trying to empathise with the situation, I'm sat there, maybe I'm just taking a shit, call me a bluff there. Maybe I'm just taking a shit.

Call me a bluff old traditionalist. I wouldn't take a shit in the public toilet, but so I am. I'm sat there. Why wouldn't you? What if you really needed one? Okay, it depends on the public toilet. It's not the point. If I sat there and a penis came through the hole in the side,

I am telling you now I would probably ignore it finish what i was doing and just try and get out there as soon as possible i would not be doing what i think at best is a low percentage play and starting to engage in the pit with the penis in some way to try and get rid of it and i certainly would not be shoving a sharp implement into another man's penis because i don't think the punishment fits the crime that's why no I don't think the punishment fits the crime. That's why. No, I don't think it is. Yeah, and you could accidentally have just popped it through there

by accident if you were particularly gifted. I've never touched a man's penis. Would you know? I think I've never touched a man's penis skin on skin. So I'd take the opportunity, give it a little slap, see what another man's penis feels like in my hand. Just slap it as hard as you can. Well, that's what they want.

They want someone to touch it. Would you not give it a little touch? No, I think if I was decided to go down the route of touching another man's penis skin on skin, I think I would like to know the person. Oh, right, okay. Oh, it's important, is it, to get a fuller picture? Right, I see.

Interesting. Can I move us swiftly on to an email that I think will be... Please do. ...really well received by our listeners, but actually quite poorly received by you, Pete? Okie dokie. It's a beauty. Go ahead.

The title... Regular listeners will know that I give little titles to these emails so I don't forget what they are. And the title I've given for this one from a while back is Pete has angered a gamer and I am here for it. Oh, no, no, no. Hello, lads. As a longtime fan of the Football Ramble, Football Ramble Daily,

I decided to get stuck into the Luke and Pete show while I have a lot of time on my hands during lockdown. I love the show. But my once favorite rambler has got my knickers right in a twist. Oh, no. Pete, during episode 199.98, I couldn't help but notice you call Zelda Breath of the Wild, in quotes, a game for children. As a 23-year-old man who spends most of his free time playing computer games i find this assessment repulsive beside the main game being relatively challenging there is an unbelievable wealth of

things to do yes you've managed to make it to hyrule castle and defeat the mighty ganon himself after completing 40 shrines what about the other 40 shrines visible to the player what about the other 40 that are hidden and only unlocked via the completion of quests if you've completed all that how about collecting the 900 korok seeds spread throughout the game and what about finding the odd ball at a certain location at a certain time of day to access the monster shop and then saving up enough monster parts to unlock unique items with unique buffs a child can do all this show me the child this also this almost certainly won't make the show as i'm sure you have more pressing matters to bring to our attention but if you're

still making use of your nintendo switch i highly recommend dragon quest 11 all the rest all the best ross from birmingham p, this man is fuming. Ah, he is, isn't he? Yeah. Sorry, mate. Yeah, I think that's fair. I think that's a fair assessment. Well, you're backing down now, because you were making a clinical point about me the other week. Well, I mean, the fact that I am only, like, five

shrines into that game dictates that I don't really have, I'm not in a position to discuss the difficulty. But certainly the stylistic cues of that game is't really have. I'm not in a position to discuss the difficulty. But certainly the stylistic cues of that game is definitely slightly childish. So, you know. But Pete, you've apologised to Ross of Birmingham, but are you going to apologise to me as well?

No, because you buy the maddest games ever. I'm playing Witcher 3 still. You like that one? Are you still getting through that? Yeah, I enjoyed that. It was very good. It's slightly my adult experience, I think it's fair to say well you sometimes

you cut people in half you do sometimes you cut people in half there's nothing more adult than that I'm going to tell you what don't put your don't put your penis

through a hole in the cubicle when the girl Rivia's on the other side you'll have it right off in his little scar oi oi oi I bet his penis is a right mess

to be fair oh mate he's covered his scars in his upper body the rest of his body is absolutely ruinous, isn't it? Disaster Report 4, Summer Memories, is my recommendation. I don't know whether I've talked about this on this podcast, but in the shadow of a massive earthquake,

you must brave a destroyed city where your choices will determine who survives. What's it called? Disaster Report 4. Is it on the Switch? Yes, it is. It's the worst game. I paid 55 quid for it, inexplicably. Oh, for God's sake.

And that is the worst piece of shit I have ever played in my life. It is a PlayStation 3 era game that has managed to convert for the Switch. It is dreadful. You just spend your time walking around the ruins of a city just giving people sandwiches and telling people where their friends are. It is unspeakably bad. What would Ross from Birmingham think of it?

He would have an issue with it because he's clearly a man who respects games. Oh, suck it up to him now. How old is he, 23? Yeah. I mean, that's not that old in the grand scheme of things.

We're ancient compared to him. Yeah, that is true. Another quick one from me pete is from um ian who says uh in a weird in a weird luke and pete coincidence you spoke on monday that's last monday of the distinctly average director mcgee do you remember that pete yes i do yeah but apparently we failed to mention his magnum opus because he did in fact direct the video for one week by the Barenaked Ladies. Oh, wow.

So there is a bit of a look-a-bit connection. Very, very oversaturated colours, that. Proper 90s video, that, isn't it? It's been... It's up there with, like, Lit's My Own Worst Enemy in that kind of very 90s... Or Steal My Sunshine by Len. ...oversaturated colour. Yes, bang it, bang it.

Put it on the mo-ken in slow motion. Love it. Great tune, though. Great tune. Got it on the mocha in slow motion. Love it. Great tune. Got a lot of time for that. Fantastic. Omar Khan has got in touch. Hello, Omar.

Thank you very much. Hi, gang. Gang, we're a gang now. I think you may find it interesting to know you've made some uncanny predictions slash commentary which have come to fruition on the Luke and Pete show.

I found myself to be in the position where I was drastically behind all of my podcasts to the point where in April 2020 I'd only listened to the December 2018 of our show.

This, however, has proved to be a boon during the lockdown as Luke and Pete, my episodes are generally Seinfeld of podcasts. I now find myself... That's the show about nothing. That is an amazing compliment to us. I mean, I've never watched it, but everyone seems to like it.

I'll take that. He turns up in that Michael John documentary, doesn't he? Yeah, he does, yeah. Don't want to be pleased to I'll take that. He turns up in that Michael Jordan documentary, doesn't he? Yeah, he does, yeah. Don't want Sleaze to see it as well. No, no, even Michael Jordan can't pretend that he watches Seinfeld.

He's like, hey, these guys here, they watch your film, they watch your TV show and you're like, oh, thank you very much. Oh, great. So weird.

Yeah, this is where the plot thickens. I've been listening to two or so um looking picture episodes while doing my household chores and i'm starting to catch up this is where the plot thickens um whilst doing the washing up this morning listen to 136 episodes uh digger destruction from the 24th of january 2019 um i was so shocked with what i was hearing that i dropped the slotted spoon I was scrubbing.

Ooh, they are difficult to wash sometimes. In this episode, you touch on four individual topics which are sufficiently remote that they cannot all be classed as one uncanny guess slash statement. I've ordered and rated these based on the strength of the prediction in a Nando-style grading. Do you want lemon and herb, medium, extra hot or extra hot? I think start from lemon and herb and build up.

All right. Knocky-knocky. JCBchat turned to how an irate Scouse digger driver smashed up a hotel foyer as revenge for an unpaid bill and commenters made regarding it like a riot, which has echoes of, obviously, civil unrest all around the world. That's your lemon and herb. That's where we're starting at.

That is tenuous. That is tenuous, but it does get better. We mentioned the word riot, and then there was a riot around the world somewhere at some point later. But it does. I'm not saying we started anything. I'm just saying that we're obviously, you know, we're talking about something.

We're talking about four different elements of life that in one show has been replicated within the last couple of weeks in the world, if you know what I mean. Yeah. Does that make sense? Yeah, fair enough. Medium or extra hot? I told you, start off and build up. Alright, okay. Boris Johnson. This is medium. Whilst on the chat of Diggers, you referenced how Boris Johnson

was paid £10,000 to stand in front of a JCB for a speech, and there seems to be general incredulity that this was acceptable. Little did you know, six months later, becoming leader of the conservatives and ultimately becoming pm and december the 19th would continue expressing his jcb fetish by driving a jcb through a polystyrene wall labeled brexit the jcb boris johnson action continues is hot is hot we're getting hotter we're getting hot yeah next the conversation turns to how certain web browsers have a plugin which places warnings and flags on sites where the content is

known to be spurious we're talking infowars alex jones david eich etc little did lucan pete of january 29 consider that in june 20 of uh the uh effing president of the united states would no less would have his fact-checked warnings on his tweets due to the utter load of bollocks spouted. You then commented that if you're an author or consumer of content deserving of such a warning, you really need to have a long look at yourself. I'm going to move straight on to Extra Hot.

Okay. As part of discussions regarding a couple who were shocked to find strangers in flagrante in their cruise room, the chat wanders over to how cruise ships are hotbeds for illnesses, Yeah. Yeah. We've gone from lemon and herb to extra spicy. Yeah. Uncanny or just the Luke and Pete show in microcosm?

I think it's just the Luke and Pete show in microcosm, although I do understand that there are some interesting kind of portents there. And apologies to those who could hear my cat whining away in the background during that, Pete. He wanted to go out, as he always does when I'm in the middle of recording a show. But that is an amazing piece of work

for that emailer to find those coincidences and share them with us. In one episode, just a lot of, you know, inverse kind of predictions from the future. Can I take the email section and turn it a little bit more cerebral? And this is a bit of a gamble and i don't fully understand this myself but someone called pete has emailed in i presume it's not you pete

although your track record on this subject has been far better than mine but it's um it's from a maths phd student uh at cambridge talking about the holes in straws and all that kind of thing. Pile in. All right, I'm going to read it, and maybe we can try and pick over the bones of it at the end and see what part of it we understand. You probably understand more of it than me because you've got this much better background than me,

as we discussed before. But we'll give it a go. This is from Pete. He's not given his surname because he's probably ashamed of emailing our show. He obviously should have better things to do, but we very, very much appreciate him sending in the email. He says, Dear Luke and Pete,

On a recent episode, you discussed a question from a listener about how many holes a straw has. I found this very interesting, and clearly you did too, since it made it into the ad for your podcast during Football Ramble Daily. I am a maths PhD student in

Cambridge and as with many other discussions of this nature this makes me fully qualified to ruin your fun with a boring speech. Here we go. The classification of surfaces and the problem of how many holes something has is actually quite a subtle one in maths. In short this is because holes are not actually part of the surface you are trying to describe, and being precise about whether or not they are there is actually quite tricky. It depends on exactly what you mean by hole. It turns out there are in fact different types of hole. The most common definition is called the genus. This is equal to the number of different closed loops you can draw on the

surface and then cut along which does not make the surface become disconnected i.e split into two parts for example as every child can tell you a balloon has a genus zero since you if you cut along any loop draw on the balloon you will end up with two separate parts. A hollow donut has genus one, since if you draw a circular loop going through the center, i.e. the shorter circle, and cut along it, the object remains in one piece. It becomes a horseshoe shape. Similarly, a donut with G holes will have a genus G.

From this, you can see that a straw, in fact, has genus zero, since cutting along any loop you draw will separate the straw into two parts. So by this definition a straw in fact has zero holes. Strangely this means a straw would only have a hole if you fastened the ends together and made it into a donut. Interestingly though by a different definition you might say it has one hole. Although they both have genus zero, a straw is different from a balloon because you can draw a loop around the straw which can't be smoothly contracted to a single point. This is not the case on a balloon where any loop you draw can be shrunk to a point without breaking the loop.

In fancy maths language they have different Betti numbers. The one type of unshrinkable loop on a straw means it has one one-dimensional hole a balloon on the other hand there's no one-dimensional holes but it does have a two-dimensional hole where all the air is trapped so by this definition they both have a hole but they are different types of hole i hope that wasn't too boring and thanks for your chat during these strange times pete now pete i don't understand really any of that so maybe you can help me i think it's very much like you know when you're a kid and you get told by someone that time is the fourth dimension uh erroneously um and then you kind of um realize that it's not and then someone tries to explain to you um how you may

um display the fourth dimension on a three-dimensional uh matrix and you just can't get your head around it some people have tried to explain the fourth dimension to me so many times and how that might, you know, manifest itself in, in a visual kind of situation for me. I honestly cannot get my head around what I managed to just written into an email. No, same. And when you,

when you find out that people who study something like the origin of the universe, or they get into such deep theoretical physics that they're having to do maths in different dimensions. It's just, I mean, no one is going to get that. I mean, you're talking about really a handful of people. I mean, Malcolm Gladwell talks about it, doesn't he, when he talks about how the criticism he gets for his books is that he gets criticism from scientists that say his work is too broad.

And he's like, well, yeah, but the thing is you're writing a book for probably an audience of 200 people. But don't try to write a book for an audience of millions of people, ideally. That's the whole point of this. So I think with this type of thing, the audience for it is so small that it's going to be very, very difficult for any normal, in quotes, person or regularly educated person to get it. And I think with the dimensions thing,

the only thing I can offer on that is that I was once taught that if you draw a stick man who could only move back and forward or up and down on a flat piece of paper, it's obviously in theory going to be impossible for him to understand the third dimension, i.e. depth. And that's the position we're in about the fourth dimension i think the only way it can properly be explained is through mathematical equations right which is of no use to anyone certainly not any use to me this is no use to anyone get out of my sight but we welcome and

appreciate p um uh emailing into hello definitely teacher.com because I'm, for one, I'm very, very happy that a PhD student in maths from Cambridge is finding anything at all of worth in this show, to be honest. Can you imagine? Can you imagine? The mind does buckle. Got an email from Dave Clayton.

Oh, Dave Clayton. He's in Japan at the moment, listening to your discussion about glass and Japanese windows on Monday. Reminds me of a theory I once read about technological developments and the use of glass in Europe and Asia. Consider this. Number one, to the lack of glass technology in China, sight correcting lenses did not develop and become used there. Number two, scientists and thinkers on both continents would read by lantern or candlelight

late into the night, thus ruining their vision. Number three, European scientists, unlike their Asian counterparts, could correct their vision with lenses, this allowing them to read effectively for more hours per day for more years into their old age when scientists apparently come up with their best ideas due to standing on the shoulders of a greater volume of giants. Long story short, Europe caught up with

and surpassed the earlier technological advancements of China because of glass. Still leaves us with a question that dave uh right at the end of his email why didn't china develop glass that's all i want to know that's all i asked at the start of this i i can't think of why i know it's the case i don't know why it's the case and no one else seems to know either we've peaked the phd student no maybe Maybe. I think it might be... I think that might be part of a joke, actually. And why... What? And why didn't China develop glass?

They had good China for cups. That's what I said. What? They used to use... Well, they developed China really early on, so they didn't need to develop glass as a vessel. Right. That's what I said.

You said it was wrong. Did we... I didn't say it was wrong. I was talking about the windows, you know, the idea of having no windows in a was wrong. I didn't say it was wrong. I was talking about the windows, the idea of having no windows in a Japanese house. I didn't care about your cup theory. Yeah, it's got conflator or something along the way. Well, speaking of things that may or may not be true,

I mean, do you necessarily buy the scientists in the West having glass, so therefore having corrective lenses, and therefore, because people travel. If you're making glasses, people know. Pete, I think you know that I don't know. Well, it was like somebody, Malcolm Gladwell, somebody was telling us or reminding me of, I think it was in Freakonomics, where he was talking about, you know, like Mayor Giuliani,

where he sort of said that his zero tolerance kind of approach to um policing like really hard-nosed policing uh really um helped his his city uh to to become a less crime-ridden um kind of situation and and then somebody and then gladwell apparently uh pointed out that um it's apparently more down to the fact that abortion was made legal 18 years before again that's in frequent notice but that wasn't written by gladwell that's written by stephen dubner i thinkakonomics, but that wasn't written by Gladwell. That's written by Stephen Dubner, I think. Oh, right. Okay. Freakonomics is Gladwell, isn't it? No, Freakonomics is

Dubner and Levitt, but you're right to say that is in that book. Absolutely right. Yeah, that does exist in the theory in that book. What was I going to say to you? Oh, and with the conflation on the glass thing, what I actually originally said was that it may be why they didn didn't have glass in japanese houses i think that's where the confusion comes from but i'd like to know there's any kind of scholar out there who

can tell us definitively if it is true that glass didn't develop in that part of the world till much later on or if they didn't develop it independently and for what reason that's what i'm going for um all right so so yeah that's that's Pete, that's what I want to get out of this, really. That's the only reason I'm still doing this show now. Hello, Luke from PeteShaw.com, if you've got any ideas, if you've read a book on the matter, if you've watched a YouTube video on the matter, we want to know.

Well, we've got to draw a line somewhere. Have you been watching any good YouTube channels recently, Peter? No, I've not. My YouTube uh watching has dropped off uh what band again taken out yeah it just goes on because that boat you sailed out into the mediterranean i just want everyone to you know play with a straight back yeah i think we all do all right let's let's wrap up here then pete thank you very much everyone for getting in touch if you do want to get in touch again uh hello at luke and pete show.com we're at luke and pete show on twitter as well which we do peruse occasionally

so it is worth tweeting us on there and we'll be back on monday with more of this nonsense i'm hoping at some point soon we might even be able to get back into our studio but we're not sure when yet so we'll keep on going as we are for now but thank you very much for your your listenership we do appreciate it and all that's left for us to say is have a lovely weekend and we'll see you on Monday. Totty bye bye. This was a Stakhanov production.