The Luke and Pete Show - Unofficial Chinese Police Stations

Episode Date: August 3, 2026

Bizarre stories abound on today’s show as Luke recollects when a load of covert overseas Chinese “police stations” were found in the UK and Pete details a data encoding furore from the 1990s. Plus, we learn what both the guys’ outrageous scientific claim would be to make a quick buck and disappear before the ruse was discovered.Finally, it’s email time yet again and there’s a lovely prom van to have a gander at.Send us your latest stories, questions and comments here: [e-mail] Luke and Pete Show is the sometimes ridiculous, always funny podcast with Luke Moore and Pete Donaldson: two men who have time on their hands and a good idea of how to waste it. Subscribe to get your comedy podcast fix every Monday and Thursday. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Luke in Pitchie Johnson with you John by Mr. Lukie Moore. We are recording on a day where the rumours are still circling about Chelsea signing some old men. Why is this happening? I realise this isn't the football ramble, but do you think men who played well into a 35th to 36th year like Jabby Alonzo? Do they just sort of trust older players?

I think they just see a little bit of themselves in them. I think it's because Chelsea has spent so much time son of young players. They're like, I'll fucking out. We need some experience. We need some experience. Yeah. Who probably,

Well, Beck and Henderson would have played together at Sunderland, I think, as well, which is quite interesting. Oh, nice. I like it. Yeah, nice link up there. I saw Levi Cole would have a brilliant dig at Enzo Moreska in a press conference

yesterday. What did he say? Well, he was like, I can't remember, but the usual shit that, like players say when they want to be in the team with a due manager. Oh, right.

Training's like so much fun now. You know, like that kind of shit. I'm paraphrasing, but something like that. Oh, that shit. Yeah, love that.

Big fan of that. But I mean, you've got, look, you've got, with your boss, like, it's,

brown nosing is underage. It's really useful. I would, I would always, when I had a proper job, I would always, if it was a job I cared about, I would always respond best to people,

just let me get on with it because I felt like I knew what I was doing. And I always, but I would always just take some time to find out what my boss was kind of into and pretend to be interested in it. Yeah I like a substitute teacher type thing

Yeah Look it's just sensible It's taking care of business You never had a problem with your work Oh yeah We had a boss at absolute Pretty much What were you like with the boss

Absolute? What were you like at the boss at You got fired from XFN didn't you? I wasn't that XFM And I left XFM Under my own volition I thought you got five Because of the Alex Alexane thing

No no no I wasn't involved in that actually The Hobgoblin On holiday The Hobgob game I wasn't No Oh no They got rid of

the little assistants, the little kind of sidekicks on the breakfast shore because the hobgoblin thing but I got, I did, they moved me to a Oh, you moved to a different job? Sure, you want me to move you. And what about absolute radio?

Did they mind that you kept breaking the no repeat guarantee or? I think there was, I think the amount of free interviews I did. I actually found a little, it's actually on this, I found in an old pair of trousers this little

I don't know what you call these I was a compact flash card it's four gigabytes of data and it's chunky it's bigger than SD card but they you used to turn up at the Soho Hotel or wherever you're doing the interviews with the Hollywood lot

the Hollywood set and they'd give you to they'd record your interview and then they'd give you two of these one for your camera and one for the actor that you're interviewing and this is a video of me but just me interviewing Keanu Reeves.

So I don't know where the Keanu Reeves side of the conversation is. That's annoying because that's the main bit. Isn't it? So it's just me sitting down in a very needlessly heavy court. It's like asking for a steak

and just been given the big strip of fat. Yeah. Well, I'd like that to be honest. Well, you'd like to eat that. Some people like the Pete Donaldson of the affair. But yeah, it's four gigabytes of me talking to a fierce look.

So you've got, you basically collected a load of these memory cards. and you could just wipe them and use them for your own personal. Yeah, you've got to give it. Yeah, I mean, they're not great. They're a bit slow and they're not, they're not your commoner garden SD cards, so they're not really that used to. But memories at a premium these days, isn't it?

I reckon I, I reckon they're probably worth more than you think. Yeah. It's very hard to buy anything with memory. Do you remember that story of the, I don't know how true it is. I mean, I presume it is true, but there's the story of a load of kind of Russian operatives just leaving, just chucking USB sticks all over the place in the UK. Oh yeah, no, you just find them and use them and then you just find them and get on and they go to networks and stuff.

Yeah, absolutely wild. Whenever like anybody from like the Chinese, well, you know, the Chinese government or any civil servant from China or Russia when they would walk around the, you know, they'd get a tour of the House of Lords or whatever, they would have, there would be a sweep right afterwards following and check in every little sort of like power supply.

I know, and I'll tell you the story. I might tell you before. but a friend of mine, good friend of mine in fact. They are responsible for the facilities, as in they run the building, have a couple of buildings in an important part of Central London politically. Let me be careful, I'll say this. And they were doing a check at the end of the day of the buildings and stuff. and they found a Chinese national

mucking around with one of the servers in the building and they had to basically what's it called, invoke this kind of protocol and shut everything down. Yeah, lock the building down, get people out

and the person was arrested. And they were basically posing as some kind of like business exchange person. Right, yeah. You can't be careful. You don't know where people are come from and it's, you know, getting increasingly harder to to, I mean, there's a lot of like North Korean,

there's a lot of North Korean programmers who come over, they get jobs with AI companies and stuff, and they're just, they're just, you know, they're just installing whatever they fancy or, you know, working out. But the people who have these companies, these Silicon Valley executives, don't want them to leave because they're quite good programmers.

They're like, oh, they're a spy, but they're so good at their job. Yeah, great work. How annoying. Speaking of... I told you, I always invoke this, but like it's... It always really reminds me of that seed in this country, that episode of this country where... It's obviously based out in Gloucestershire.

And one of them's dad is... He kind of trails throughout the episode, the fact that he's got a really good story about Fred West. And the punchline is just that it turns out that he thought Fred was just a really good builder. Best in the West we call him. And he'd say, Stop it, Martin.

That's a story. And he goes, he goes out like, I know he's on some dodgy stuff, but he was, he was the best. He was brilliant. But on that Chinese thing,

by the way, you know, you know, a story of like a few years ago when the UK, I can't remember it was now, the government minister for this particular thing,

the security minister or whatever had to come out and say that there's been a load of unofficial Chinese police stations found in the, like London. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What, what, policing, what, policing the Chinese community or just policing?

Well, so it would be, it would be like they would, I guess they would, I don't really know what they were using them for, but I don't think it's been published, but like the guy had to come out and say that they've closed them down now and like, there's no evidence of any wrongdoing. It's basically just smacks of like them just internally saying to China. Can you fucking stop doing this? Can you stop doing it? But what's the police station?

Like what? Like Chinese, what are they, what? So, but are they surveilling their own people effectively? Because they like to do that. So let's say, what is the, I think the Chinese government line is that like,

is like there are, they open centres. They call them like, you know, whatever it's like citizen centers for Chinese nationals in the UK. Right. And it's an extension of their Communist Party kind of, quite,

unquote, run by volunteers to help Chinese nationals, like new documents and do visas and stuff like that. But like, this talk of like, you know, people just can't go in them unless they're types of people. It's just fucking weird. It's wild, isn't it? Yeah.

And all of the, uh, and all the right wingers are worried about Sharia law. Literally fucking police distance. Well, and what's completely like, what's totally like Orwellian double speaking is a lot of those guys who are complaining all the time about Sharia law, which is one of these kind of weird myths that, you know, it's never really been the case in the UK. And it's like the whole Muslim, Muslim no go areas thing. It's just fucking made up

that bit. And yet at the same time, they are have proven to be funded by Russian fucking interests who are committing asymmetrical warfare on the UK and have been for like 20 years. And they don't actually be worried about that. There's people actually be poisoning British nationals

in the UK. They're chucking USB sticks around. They're doing massive online campaigns to spread disinformation. You know, they're at war with a European partner. And no one's says shit about that. No.

I mean, they literally tried to blow up fucking planes. Like, you know, uh, car-op planes at airports. Yeah, absolutely. And Farage will,

Farage will, openly say, like, the, the, uh, the political leader here admias most is Vladimir Putin,

right? And no one, rock and no one gives a fuck. And no one says shit to him. Like, and if they do, he just shuts it down and just moves on. Like,

it's, it's bonkers. Wild. Um, speaking of, uh, this lovely story that sort of, you know,

when you watch like a documentary about someone who's like murdered somebody, you know, like, there's that... Lovely story, is it? A lovely story. No, but like, you know when like people, people murder people and they get interviewed and you're like, oh, as this case goes on, you sort of see, you know, the murderer or proposed murderer getting interviewed and you're like, oh, I'm so glad I haven't murdered anyone. Do you know what I'm so glad?

I don't have that on my fucking conscience and that on my shoulders and known that the net is closing in. In 1995, a Dutch television repairman. This should have been their first clue. Jan Sloot, or Jan Sloot, claimed that he had cracked something impossible. Slute, no, no, double O. Jan Sloot. Right at the Jan Sloot.

Claimed he had cracked something impossible, a way to store an entire feature film in a single kilobite of data. Are you familiar with how big a kilobite of data is? It's like a fucking, it's a paragraph of writing. If that. And he basically called the Slute Digital. coding system and he said that he could put an entire feature film beside a

kilobite of data. Sluke demonstrated it apparently recording and replaying movies of a small smart card and he convinced serious money to back him because you know the city is always willing to throw money at absolute you know nonsense absolute snake oil. It was like a former Philip CTO who got involved

at Silicon Valley Venture Capitalists as well and then on July 11th, 1999, one day before the deal was to be signed, Sluke was found dead in his garden of a heart attack. A compiler stored on a floppy disk, which was the key piece, had vanished, and it was never recovered. What happened? Well, the engineers later examined the rig that he was using, and he discovered that smart card player just actually had a hard drive in it.

So he'd faked the whole demonstration. Was the heart attack? An actual heart attack there? It wasn't like a conspiracy? I feel like, look, I don't know. They didn't seem like there was any kind of dodgy dealings going on. But it just makes me sort of think that he was just probably so stressed out. He genuinely thought he could get there.

And the hard drive was just buying him some time. But it's always, there was like a solid state battery that everyone was getting very excited about this year. I think a Swedish company, I think we're heading it up. And pretty much anybody who was anybody, Like, you know, there's loads of money, get, you know, a lot of interested parties about this kind of amazing battery that could, you know, allow you to charge your car in like 30 seconds and, and, you know, it would last twice as long as your usual car battery and stuff. All that shite. It always happens. And then, you know, completely against every sort of physical kind of rule or law out there that this battery could supply so much energy so quickly and easily and be recharged so softly.

and yeah it just turned out the guy was just a bit of a joker really he was a guy he was like a television repairman basically he was just one of those kind of like dragons den kind of dreamers not really just wants his dad to give him a hard

just wants Fred I just think we should get involved in that caper really you know you can be the talking man I can look like a nerd and we just sound like we know what we're fucking doing that Elizabeth Holmes Theranos thing yeah make a bit of money Like make it, don't make like billions.

Just make a couple of mill. Disappear it in the fucking ether. Lovely old job. Yeah. What would you go into? What would you be your outrageous scientific claim? Ooh, I don't know. Hotter water.

It's like, you know you like a cup of tea? Yeah. Milk allowing. You like a cup of tea. But it's like it's, it's, we've managed to make water stay liquefied at like 300 300 degrees or something. It's, it's hotter. You're going to have to be.

that, aren't you? It needs to be more complicated. I don't, no, no, no, no, no. So I've got a new colour. We shot it. We just get a dodgy, we just get a dodgy temperature gauge and go, look, 300. We just rub all the numbers off. And when it gets to 100, it goes to 300.

You go, look, see, 300. And we can be working really hard to do it. Someone will probably say that's cleverer than all of us, that you can actually get water in liquid form, superheated water or some bollocks. That's usually how this sort of shit on the look of a beach of, comes out. But yeah, that's...

What about, one of the one of the thing I think would be particularly interesting would be, you know, trying to some kind of outrageous claim about like unlimited energy, like a room temperature superconductor or something. That'd be good. Well, a lot of like a Pizor kind of... Is it a P, not Pizor motor, is it, it's a Pizor refrigerator or something? Like very low energy refrigerators. You see him in like mini can fridges.

promotional can fridges that hold like one can of sprite and they're not like proper refrigerants they've got any refrigerants in them they're all just like you just run a current through something and it makes it cold and it's not very good so basically a bigger one of that and just say yeah this this makes it ultimate energy refrigerator the room temperature superconductor thing has been shown to be theoretically possible I think at a very small scale

I was just reading about it there right apparently It's a thing called a superhydride, which can show superconductivity near room temperature, but has only been shown to be able to do so inside diamond anvil cells at very, very tiny quantities. But you remember Dr Michael Brooks, who we do Eureka with? Yes. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Great guy, brilliant scientist as well. He's written so many good books.

He's a good lad. He was saying that, like, when he did his PhD, um, his final project his final project like thesis or whatever he was doing something around that and he said and he you know he was awarded his PhD I can't remember specifically what he did

I'd have to ask him because I can't remember but he said that one of the great things about doing the experimentation was that they did it inside this center somewhere this vacuum fucking thing in his lab and he said at the time they did the specific experiment the inside of the little fucking thing was the coldest place in the known universe.

Right, okay. Wow. Isn't that cool? Literally. What would you do if you climbed? I don't you get in it. I think it had to be like sealed and be a vacuum and had to stand quite far away from it.

Right. But he's like a... I don't like the sound of that stuff because I feel like it... I realise these lads have probably thought about it, but I just always feel like something could crack just end it all, just end the entire universe. And you're like, oh, well done, dickheads,

pissing about with stuff you don't really understand. Don't like it. It was quantum physics, his PhD was, and I've just checked. He's got a brilliant book called 13 things that don't make sense. One of my favourite science books. But it was published in 2009, and now like eight of them do make sense. He was saying that eight of them have been sorted out now. So it's definitely what it should be.

That's exactly what science should be. You should be excited by the fact that you get proven wrong. It's sort of been a toxic fucking dickhead. No, actually, giants are real. They do live in the Afghan mountains, actually. Yeah, Neil de Grastheson, I mean. I know he's been pulled up for some questionable behaviors. But, like, he, as a scientist, he, like,

he goes and debates people all the time. And because he's so clever and because he knows so much about the science behind stuff, he just sits there and very calmly and casually, he goes, yeah, that's bollocks, though. I mean, that's not true. And here's why it's not true. But he did it with brilliantly with Logan Paul who I mean this is a measure of how stupid some people are Logan Paul has Neil deGrasse Tyson on his podcast

and the first thing he says is something like yeah I don't believe in the moon landings prove to me that it happened and it's like Neil that's not the most low hanging fruit for like Neil deGrasse Tyson he's like it's about 15 reasons that it definitely happened and here's the proof at the end Logan Paul just goes yeah yeah I suppose so then yeah it's a great yeah they're not massively wedded like a lot they've got no convictions have they no no they just like give me some more money please

i would say that we're on the product thing i reckon just making something well is actually quite a revolutionary product these days you know like how like you know products the you know good you know good products that have that are from companies that have real prestige and real history and you know their brand names that people trust they're kind of like

the name almost becomes the product eventually and the pan is like a cost to be managed it's kind of like the the role thing that you're well it's just like I use an example of pan like you know cookware is getting worse and worse every year

like everything's getting thinner they're trying to sort of just like carve out as much metal and still have the same you know name on the front of the of the thing. And it's just like everything is just getting

worse and worse and worse. And if you just started from the start and went, I've just made a lovely pan or a ball and go, this is a nice ball. I think people have just flocked to it because you're like,

just making it nice. But what about you? You're going to take on? You're going to take on the, you're going to take him on? I'm taking on the, yeah, I'm going to take on the Le Cruset.

I imagine if you compared to Le Cruset one from like the 70s or the 60s, I presume it's been going quite a while. Well, you reckon this is worse quality now? I reckon so.

They've got to be, haven't they? They've got, you know, everyone cuts their cloth accordingly. I reckon, no, I reckon they probably make a real virtue

of being like, this is still the shit. You reckon? I think a lot of brands do do that. Like, a lot of brands do, it's like the old kind of, the old sted artois,

reassuringly expensive type chat, isn't it? Right, yeah, that's kind of their brand. That's how they position. Do you think, yeah,

yeah, yeah. Why don't we come up with asbestos too? Like, a better aspect, a better, a better kind of asbestos. Call it something else though.

Don't mention asbestos in the marketing material. Fab spestos. Is it fabulous? Is it that asbestos is actually fine unless you break it apart? Is that right? Yeah, I mean, imagine like all those pit bulls like,

because you mind it, don't you? It comes out of the ground. Imagine like happening upon some asbestos in the ground. You'd be like, what the fuck? Why is it so crystalline? Why is it so strange? You'd have to go quite deep down, I suppose.

My great uncle died of asbestosis. Wild. He was a shot fitter, yeah. And he got, yeah, caught up with him. Very, very, very terrible. It's a terrible way to go to that. Yeah, absolutely awful. I mean, you've got,

you'll get a little flavor of it because of your severe asthma as getting worse or worse. Yeah, exactly. Not being in a fucking breeze. You've checked that you've got asbestosis? Well, I mean, I've been... Were you a minor as a child?

No, I'd not be big wall down, but I did wear a mask, so I think we're all right. I didn't wear a mask quite as diligently when I knocked down the old Stack Studio, so, you know, my writ will be appearing. Oh, man. As I said at the time, I have never seen someone so excited at the prospect of doing that. Yeah. It took loads longer than you thought, but you loved it.

Every moment. If anybody out there wants something knocking down, not tidying up, I'm not tidying up, but I'll knock it down. Not doing that bit afterwards. You said it would take you about 40 minutes to take that studio down. I think it took you all day, didn't it? No, I said it, no, it took me two days. I said it would take an afternoon.

But it turns out they'd made it quite nice. Did you bring your own sledgey? I didn't even have a sledgey at that point. I just had a, I had a couple of cutting bits of, I had a reciprocating sore, I think. It was great seeing you do it. It was just great seeing you do it. It was not watching a fat person to eat.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely top. class it was. Oh man, take me back. Take me back. What a summer. Was it two summers ago? It was two summers ago. No, it was last August? Is it last August? Yeah. Christ did I break. Yeah, we went to the new studio last August.

It was such a long time ago since I've knocked down the studio. Oh, so sad. What a great thing. What a great thing. Listen, Pete, before we go, we should probably do an email. We've got a couple. We've got it for a while. Lovely. Let's do it. What have we got here? Let me find one. It is. Oh, so this is from.

from Mark about the, the, that you taking your neighbor's child to prom in the Toyota century. Right. Yeah, okay, nice. Yeah, remember that? Mark, hello to you, Mark.

He says, my own trip to the prom, I went in the back of my dad's van. Oh, lovely. Many people going to the prom, got into Hummers, Limos, etc. Not for me and seven of my friends. We got in the back of my dad's transit

with the words boys limo, painted in pink on the sheet of paper onto the side, photo attached. He's got a couple of hearts on it as well. well, and top it off on the day of the prom, my dad and his work friend found some red carpet and a skip at a site that were working at and rolled that out for us

and I arrived at the prom. It was well received by the teachers, some saying it was the best entrance they'd ever seen. Honestly, it's just, you never, you're never going to remember a fucking hummer. You're never going to remember a generic fucking, you know, a Bentley, but you will remember a bloke who's tapes with mask and tape,

the words boys limo on the side of a dirty old work fan. A big fan of that. Just, just good stuff. I think it looks great. I'd love to have seen the lads standing outside it with their terrible outfits on. That would be good. I didn't go to my school phone because I was on

holiday. My parents had booked a family holiday. I think they were quite mortified when they realised. And I was like, oh, I'm a bit gutted not to go to, to be honest, but I didn't have a girlfriend or anything, so I didn't really care. No. But isn't it just kind of like a normal kind of like school party where the boys stand in one area and the girl's standing another. I think so.

And never the, never the, I was actually thinking, I was actually thinking, um, of how bad I was with, um, members of the fair of sex as a teenager.

And in my last year of, um, school, so GCSEs, so I would have been 15, yeah, nearly 16. Yeah.

There was a girl who used to hang out of all the time called Emma. Really nice girl. And, um, and there was this, um, basically, I mean, basically I probably quite liked it,

but I was too scared to tell her. And yeah, she was like, looking back on it now, she was dropping hints, right? I found a letter from her where she wrote in it, um, why, why do you fancy all these other girls and don't fancy me? And then, and then I also, then what happened was, I was around her house and we were just hanging out and a couple of her other friends were coming around and, um, but they were a bit late or whatever. And she said to me, why don't we pretend we're boyfriend and girlfriend just to, um, just to mess around

And I was like, I'm not doing that. And it was only like years later, I realized that she was probably quite into me, but I didn't know. Well, what a lovely romantic story to finish the podcast. Unrequited. Yeah. Well, some children who might be listening to this podcast, inexplicably in the back of someone's car. That sounds like a kidnapping, didn't need to be. You also flew up off the back of the parents' car.

romantic story. That's your idea of a romantic story. That is a romantic story, but I think you should sort of give people who are in some kind of like Jack and Diane will they want their kind of situation. You should give people advice about how to get over, I suppose, and how to deal with it. Yeah, because I've lived it in such a terrible way myself. Exactly. Yeah. It's a good idea. I'm up for that. Get involved. I help out. I hope in with two feet. I always thought we should do ag in the uncle sections on this show because I think people would benefit from it and we'd have a lot. bloody good time doing it. We've seen a lot. We've made a lot mistakes. We've done a lot. You know? We could help people out. And we could also give, I think, a genuinely quite helpful advice to particularly young men who are desperate for good, solid

male role models. Not a Stephen Bartlett, not a Joe Rogan, not an Andrew Tate, you know. So there you go. The asbestos of the Yeah, we're perfectly safe as long as don't break us into tiny parts. All right then guys, we'll back on Thursday for more of this. Get your emails in.

If you've got a problem that only we can solve, hello at Luke Pete Show.com is the way to do that. You can also get in touch with via the YouTube as well. See you later. See you later. Later.

Allegator. The Luke and Pete Show is a stack production and part of the ACAST Creator Network.