➡ The author criticizes the increasing regulations on car emissions and the push for electric vehicles (EVs), arguing that these changes are making cars more expensive and less accessible for average people. They believe that the focus on EVs ignores other significant sources of pollution, like China, India, and AI data centers. They also express concern that the push for EVs and hybrids is leading to the loss of unique cars like the Miata. The author suggests that cars may become a luxury item only the rich can afford, similar to the early days of the car industry.

➡ The speaker criticizes the lack of affordable electric cars in the market, arguing that if climate change is a real threat, there should be more efforts to promote low-cost, efficient electric vehicles. They express frustration over the fact that the market no longer responds to what people want, but rather to government demands. The speaker also highlights how this situation is negatively impacting not just teenagers trying to become adults, but also people on the lower end of the economic spectrum, limiting their work and living options. They question the end game of these policies, suggesting they are harming the average person and reducing the standard of living.

➡ The text discusses concerns about the increasing wealth gap and the potential for a universal basic income. It criticizes the accumulation of wealth by a few individuals, suggesting it’s driven by a desire for exclusivity and control. The text also contrasts this with the approach of Henry Ford, who aimed to make products affordable for the average person. It ends by expressing concern about the potential loss of jobs due to automation and artificial intelligence.

➡ The text discusses the speaker’s concerns about the loss of individuality and freedom in society, particularly in relation to cars and city living. The speaker criticizes the uniformity of modern cars due to federal regulations and the loss of character in vehicles. They also express concern about the increasing surveillance and data collection from cars, which they liken to an invasion of privacy. Lastly, they criticize the mentality of imposing one’s preferences on others, such as city living or electric vehicles, instead of respecting different lifestyles and choices.

➡ The article discusses the increasing control and surveillance in vehicles, with manufacturers and governments partnering to add unwanted features that raise car prices. These features, such as driver assistance technology, are becoming standard and cannot be fully turned off, leading to a loss of control for the driver. The author suggests this is part of a larger plan to create a system where cars can only be operated within certain parameters, potentially leading to a future where cars can shut off if not operated correctly. The article also criticizes the rising costs of cars due to these features and the potential for a decrease in manufacturers as a result.

➡ The text discusses the inconvenience and cost of car seat safety regulations, suggesting they force families to buy larger, more expensive vehicles. It criticizes society’s fear-driven approach to safety, arguing adults should be allowed to make their own risk assessments. The text also mentions the lack of such safety measures in other countries, like China, where children ride motorcycles without seatbelts. Lastly, it criticizes societal control measures and encourages individuals to share information and support each other.

Foreigning us now. And it’s always a pleasure to have Eric on. It’s been too long since we talked. Eric Peters of ericpetersautos.com A real soul mate when it comes to the issues of liberty and mobility, as these companies like to call it. But you know, it’s really driving cars is what we think of. We think of mobility. I’m not looking at getting into some self driving taxi and, and I’m not looking at, I don’t think of that as mobility. I think of mobility as being able to use a car to go where I want, when I want and not have to follow a schedule from some mass transportation thing or get into a car that’s owned by these corporate conglomerates.

But thank you for joining us, Eric. Oh, thank you, David. I always enjoy being here. And by the way, whenever I hear that word mobility, I almost think of people in wheelchairs. I’m a car guy. I enjoy driving and I like. Well, they want to break our legs, don’t they? They sure seem to want to. And it’s really, you know, when I think about how this country has changed in that respect just over the course of the last 40 years, you know, when I was in high school, most guys loved cars and a lot of girls like cars too.

That’s right. Now, you know, they have succeeded so effectively in alienating people from cars. I get it. You know, they become appliances, they have become soulless and on top of that, they become just impossibly expensive for ordinary people to even consider buying anymore. So no wonder people are, are turning off to cars. And that’s unfortunate. Getting us back to this whole idea of mobility which really, as you said, being able to just go where you want to go without being leashed, you know, without, without having to put your, take your hat off and beg for. Yeah, there was a song about that, you know, gotta go where you want to go, do what you want to do.

What happened to that? America? Yeah, what happened to that song? You don’t hear that anymore? It’s kind of like the other thing we used to say when, when I was younger, people would say, somebody say, well, can’t do this. And it’s like, hey, it’s a free country. You don’t hear anybody say that anymore, do you? No, I don’t think I’ve heard anybody say that since probably 9, 11, 25 years now. But that’s, you know, at least that’s a sign of psychological health. At least people aren’t so deluded as to think that we still live in a free country.

That’s right. But they are deluded enough to think that they should make a federal case out of everything. That was the other thing. Hey, don’t make a federal case out of it. You know, if somebody’s making a big deal out of it. But now we make a federal case out of everything. Every problem must be solved and managed by government. And it has to be done by government at the highest level. And not even that, but now it has to be done by the President who will save us from all evil. He’s this messianic figure. You know, I was just talking yesterday about this article out of the Atlantic, and they were talking about a study that was done by some people out of the uk.

They came to the same conclusions that Strauss and Howe did about the Fourth Turning. They went back 5,000 years of history. One of the things they said was, you know, the corruption and the decay in institutions. But also people start getting very messianic about their leaders. And I thought, yeah, that’s what I see all the time about maga. You know, it’s got to be Trump. He’s got some special mission from God, you know, he’s specially anointed and all the rest of this stuff. It is truly amazing. They’re so desperate for a messiah that they’ll even project that onto somebody like Donald Trump.

It’s sometimes it’s jaw dropping. I’m a professional writer, so usually I’m not at a loss for words, but when it comes to Trump, I often find my jaw hitting the floor. My eyes boggle like Kash Patel and I. What am I going to even say about this stuff? That’s right. It truly is amazing. Well, you told me when we were just connected and you said there’s some interesting news about Miata that I don’t think I’m going to like. What is that news? Well, just some background. The Miata has been around since 1989. They introduced it as a 90 model and it has been for many decades one of the most successful models that Mazda has ever brought out, because anybody who’s driven one will tell you it’s just it is one of the most enjoyable, fun cars that you can possibly get and drive.

The problem is that it’s gotten to be pretty expensive. The current model, 2025, the base price is nearly $30,000. To put that in some perspective, back in 1990, it was just over $13,000. Wow. Now, granted, some of that is inflation and some of that, of course, are what I call compliance Costs, you know, having to have multiple airbags in the things and all of the other stuff that’s been added to vehicles that has been raising the cost. People talk about inflation, and of course that’s true, but the thing that’s important to understand is that people’s earning power hasn’t tracked with the devaluation of buying power.

That’s really what inflation is. So back in 1990, regular Americans could afford to have two cars or even more to have the fun car. They get the Miata as the weekend car, the track car, the fun day car. Right. Summer car. Yeah, yeah. But they also had, you know, you got to have something that has more than two doors and more than two seats. If you’ve got kids, you got a family, you’re going to need something that’s practical. So they would buy the practical car for that purpose, but they’d have the Miata for fun. Well, now things have gotten to be so tight that most people can only afford one car, if they can even afford that.

So there aren’t many people left who can still afford a 30,000 doll fun car like a Miata and a $30,000 crossover on top of that, and the cost of insurance and everything else that goes along with it. So what are they doing? Well, when you’re faced with the choice between the practical and the fun, most people are going to have to pick the practical. That’s just the way life is. So it’s not that the Miata has lost its appeal. The problem is that there are not enough people anymore who can afford it to sustain the car as a viable enterprise for Mazda.

And so apparently that’s why they’re thinking about canceling it. Wow. Well, I got mine. As long as the government doesn’t find some way to declare it illegal on the streets, I’m okay with it. I do have mine. And from a practical standpoint, there’s this Eric. Groceries have gotten so expensive that about all we can fit in the car will fit in the back of the groceries, won’t it? That’s right. There’s another facet to this that’s kind of interesting. An additional rumor is that they’re not going to cancel it, but what they’re going to do is put a hybrid drivetrain into it for the next generation.

The current car has been out since, I think, 2016, so it’s getting a little old, you know, in terms of product cycles, and that the reason for that is the reason why you’re seeing so many hybrid vehicles now. Everything it used to Be that there was the Prius and maybe one or two other hybrid cars on the market, and they were marketed chiefly toward people who really wanted hyper efficiency above everything else. You know, there’s a market for that. I want to do a virtue signal about their greenness. That too. But now, you may have noticed if you look at the new car landscape, practically everything is hybrid now.

You know, to some degree or another, it’s either a mild hybrid or a full hybrid or something. And the reason for that, of course, has to do with the federal government continuing to require ever stricter mileage and so called emission standards, which chiefly means carbon dioxide, that awful gas that plants have used to metabolize and produce oxygen for us, so that we breathe. Trump, by the way, today is supposedly going to make an announcement about cafe, the Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standards. And we’ll see whether it’s any meaningful reduction or simply to kind of riff on Orwell’s 1984.

Remember when the, when the people were so happy because Big Brother had decided to increase the Choco ration, when in fact, of course it had been decreased. So, you know, what they had been hinting at was that they were going to just roll them back or keep them at where they were in 2020. Well, the reason everything’s being hybridized right now is precisely because the only way to comply with the 2020 standards was to build these hybrids which cycle the engine off as often as possible and put smaller and smaller engines in cars. It’s the only way that they can achieve compliance with these federal dictates.

So unless we see them actually rolled back significantly or better yet, eliminated altogether, I think we’re going to see more and more hybrids and we’re also going to see fewer and fewer interesting cars like the Miata available for people. Well, in terms of what Trump is doing, anything less than a complete shutdown of the CAFE regime is not anything that I would be favorable of or applaud. But if they roll it back a little bit, you know, it’ll be pushed back with the next one. What they really need to do is to go back and change the, or get rid of Nixon’s EPA and take away their power to regulate air pollution.

Right? That is the emission standards that needs to be taken away from the EPA and the EPE needs to be shut down. I mean, let’s not just stop with a CAFE rules. Let’s get rid of the EPA and let’s get rid of this finding that they can, they can tell us about all these gases because that is a real fraud. We’ve got EV pollution is being ignored for this Fake Climate Crisis is the headline of a what’s up that.com article. And it’s absolutely true. They ignore the pollution from the EVs. But I think the biggest glaring hypocrisy with all of this has in the past been that they would ignore the two biggest polluters on earth, China and India.

They could make as many power plants as they wanted to and continue to make them. Put no cleaning devices on them whatsoever. And this was supposed to address a global issue? Well, how does that address a global issue? It’s nonsense. But now we’ve had this kind of come home in the sense of the AI data centers. They want to put these AI data centers out there, so they’re obviously not interested in emissions anymore. And this has really made outrage a lot of the environmentalists that are out there. But it is just another example of how it’s real hypocrisy, it’s not a real problem.

It certainly is not existential. And it is if it’s in their advantage to do it. And it is in their advantage for the AI stuff, because that’s all about surveillance and control. That is the killer app. And so they’re going to do whatever they have to take. And they don’t care if we own anything. They don’t care if we’re able to go anywhere, and they don’t care if we’ve got any electricity. You know, you and I have said that for the longest time. You know, they, they don’t even want us to have electric vehicles. They don’t want us to have electricity.

Nevertheless, you know, own a car. So that’s where this stuff is all going. But, you know, when you talk about the Miata, that is such a perversion of the whole idea. The whole idea of the Miata was to make it incredibly light and simple. And so a lot of times, you know, people talk about modifying the Miatas. I mean, there’s a company called Flying Miata, and it’s kind of interesting what they do with it since it’s such a lightweight car. They would shove in a V8 engine into the Miata and I would read with curiosity about it, but it was something that I never wanted because then you got to get this heavy transmission.

And that was one of the nice things about the Miata was how, how it shifted and, you know, very responsive and, and how it could turn on a dime. And it was all really about being a momentum car rather than a 0 to 60 car. Right. And so if these people are going to put in there the, you know, all the added weight and all the rest of the stuff to make it a hybrid, that and, and to make it complicated to make it expensive, they might as well cancel it. Well, I agree. And it just speaks to the kind of tone deafness of the people who are running these car companies.

You’ll see across the industry, for example, the Dodge, the people in charge of Dodge who thought it would be a fine idea to take the Challenger and the Charger, which were popular cars, sold well, and turn the thing into an EV and not only with a base price that was $20,000 higher than the previous gas engine model and they thought that that would sell. They showing. What I’m trying to get at is that they were showing contempt for their own buyer demographic. Oh yeah, yeah. Or Jeep. I’m sure you wear Jeep. You know, Jeep is this French company and they have upscaled the Jeeps so much that nobody can.

Their market can’t afford it. People wanted something that was rugged and affordable and that’s the same kind of thing they’re doing to the Miata. They don’t, they don’t want to. Everybody wants to make the exactly the same car and they all want to upscale everything because they understand how expensive cars are getting and they know that only the really rich can afford this stuff. So it’s going to become a plaything for the rich. It probably. I don’t know if it’ll be in my lifetime because I’m getting at the end of it, but probably in your lifetime, you’ll probably see the idea that, you know, owning a car is like having a private plane today.

You know, oh, sure, it’s going to be a reversion to the early days of the car industry or the car world. If you went back to say about 1905 or so, the only people who owned a car were extremely wealthy people. You know, go watch episodes of Downton Abbey, you know, the BBC show about that era, Toad of Toad Hall. Right. Yes. He could afford a car and he didn’t really care what the fines were like. He was very much like Elon Musk who opened up his. He opened up a couple of businesses there, not too far from where we used to live in Texas.

He had boring and he had, I think it was, I can’t remember, maybe it was SpaceX or something. But it was not. It was not. Didn’t have anything to do with the launching thing and, and he was doing. Violating all kinds of Rules from the Department of Transportation as, as dumping wastewater directly into the Colorado River. He didn’t care. They kept fining him. They gave him the maximum amounts of fines and he didn’t care. So they said, well, we need to raise the fines up. And he’s like, well, you know, they raise the fines up, it’s going to be applied against people who can’t afford it and you’re not going to be able to raise the fine up high enough to affect Elon Musk under any circumstances.

So he was kind of like Toad of Toad hall, you know. Right. You know, here’s something to kind of explain the point to people who may not be familiar with the history of it. It used to be that when you opened the door of a General Motors Vehic vehicle, you would see this little badge on the sill and it would say body by Fisher. Yeah, Remember that? Oh, yeah. And that, that, that is something that harkens back to the days of what are called coach built cars before the Model T. This is around the turn of the turn of the last century or 1900 or so.

If you wanted a car, you went to a coach builder and they would, you would specify what you wanted and it was all custom. Everything was made to order. And obviously only very wealthy people could afford a vehicle like that. So it’s a rich man’s toy. Henry Ford came along and had the effrontery to simplify the thing and to mass produce the thing that had common parts that were stamped out and so that anybody who worked at a Ford plant could afford a car. And for 100 years afterward, people like you and I, regular people, could afford to have a car.

Well, they’re trying to bring us back to that era when vehicles were luxury items that only the very affluent people in society could afford. It’s really despicable. And I wanted to mention something else to get back to what you were mentioning before about the whole emissions climate control fraud. People don’t realize that there are EVs that you can get in Europe. I did an article the other day about a little car called the Micro Microlina. Did you happen to catch that? No, I didn’t say what? The Micro Microlina. Oh, it’s cute as a button. It’s Boutros Boutros Galli.

So nice that they named it twice. Right. What it basically is, is a small electric car that’s essentially. It looks just like the old BMW Isota. Do you remember the Isetta? Was that the one that opened in the front? Yes, exactly. I’ve Actually sat in one of those up in Chicago. Yeah, they had it as a display in a garment store there. So the same concept, it’s just a little ev. It’s not designed to go ludicrously fast. You know, it’s designed to be an urban, suburban, runabout little car and it costs about $16,000. Why can’t we have that? Wow.

I attack electric cars all the time, but fundamentally what I’m attacking is the way they’re being forced on people and the way alternatives are being taken away from people. Not the ev such I really don’t have a problem with. You know, why can’t people buy a $16,000 basic car if they don’t need ludicrous speed? They don’t need to go on the highway for several hundred miles. And the point is, like, if we, if it truly is the case that we’re facing this existential threat, the climate is changing, you know, we’re all going to die unless we don’t drive electric cars.

Well, why wouldn’t they want to encourage these affordable little electric cars that people could actually buy as opposed to these elitist cars, these EVs that, you know, we’re allowed to buy 50,000, $60,000 electric cars, but we can’t buy the little $16,000 electric car that you can buy in Europe. It just speaks to the disingenuousness of the narrative, the way they’re trying to tell you that, you know, you have to make this transition because if you don’t, we’re all going to die in the climate capacity. Well, it’s nonsense. If that were true, they’d be doing everything conceivable to encourage these low cost, efficient, simple little cars.

That’s right. It’s just like the pandemic. If they really believed everybody’s going to die, they’d let us some alternatives to their vaccine. But the plan had been that they were going to lock us down until they got their vaccine ready and then they were going to inject everybody and hold the companies harmless with what they did. But, you know, that was another smoking gun about that fraud. But you know, as you point out, these little things like that. And I remember there was also the Messerschmitt. Do you remember that? That was featured in Brazil. That was the car that the character drove in that.

I’ve never seen one of those in person, but I have sat in the BMW Izetta. I’ve sat in that thing. But you know, these things are basically golf carts. Just own it, full vibe, you Know, you know, I mean, back when I was in college, I drove a 74 Beetle, loved the car, but really it wasn’t much more than a golf cart. You know, it had trouble maintaining 65 miles an hour on anything, you know, that was at all inclined. That was pretty much it’s top speed. You know, if you had a downhill stretch and the wind was at your back, you might be able to get up to about 75 miles an hour in a Beetle.

It was fine, it was cheap, it allowed me to get on wheels, you know, so that I didn’t have to walk or take a bus. Yeah. And that’s why I’m kind of so annoyed about the fact that you can’t buy new vehicles like that little inexpensive EV that’s available in Europe. Because after all, if that thing were on the market as a used vehicle, it would probably cost only seven or $8,000. You know, after, after a couple of years of depreciation. And imagine, you know, you’re, you’re an 18 year old kid and you know, you don’t have a lot of money, but you’d like to have a car.

So, you know, here’s a car that you could, that would work as your first car. And my point is, you know, we’re being denied all these alternatives. It’s, it’s no longer the case that the market responds to what people want. That’s right. It’s, it’s what, it’s what the government demands and it’s one size fits all. And that’s why, you know, you hear everybody complaining about, oh, they all look the same. Well, there’s a reason for that. The reason they all look the same is because they all have to comply with the same government demands. That’s right.

Yeah. You remember I grew up in Florida and so the Volkswagen that I aspired to have was the Dune buggy. Care if that was practical or not. And then really doubled down with a Thomas Crown Affair that had Steve McQueen driving one of those. Remember that? I forget what the company was that put those in. We just called them, yeah, the Manx. That’s right, the Manx. And we just called them dune buggies for that. But Karen’s first car was a Pinto and that was another example. I remember you talk about how that was your rite of passage, that was how you knew you were an adult and how you now had freedom was having the wheels.

Right. And so I remember scrutinizing the stuff and figuring out how much I would have to work in order to save up and Buy a Pinto before I was able to drive because they were very cheap. I remember they were like $1,400 or something new. It was incredible how cheap they were. Of course, the dollar was. Had a lot more purchasing power than it does now. But, you know, Karen got one of those. It had rubber mats, you know, not, not carpet, of course, hand cranked windows and all that kind of stuff. The trunk was so thin that when you drop the trunk, it didn’t have a hatchback on hers, but it had a little small trunk that was maybe about a foot wide, foot deep, you know, and when you dropped it, it just shook with such thin metal.

And of course, you know, they were infamous for exploding when hit in the back, but they cut every corner that they could, including the safety equipment, to keep it from exploding when it was hit in the back. But it was, it was what she needed. And she was able to get one used. And fortunately for her, before anything happened, if she had an accident, somebody stole it from her. We were all laughing about it. It’s like, who would steal this thing? Not only was, was it that, but she had a slow leak in her radiator. And I was gonna fix it over the weekend, but it was like Thursday.

She, she goes out to get in the car and she’s got her water jug with her that she’s gonna top it up with before she goes to work. And the car was gone. She called me up and she said, you didn’t bring me home last night, right? I drove home last night. He’s like, yeah, that’s right. She goes, my car is gone. It took us a while to actually pinch ourselves and wake ourselves up to the fact that somebody had stolen the thing. He was like, who would steal this? And everybody jokes that you leave it running with the keys in the car in a bad neighborhood or something to get this to happen.

But it was transportation, and sometimes that’s what you need. And they don’t want us to have that anymore. Yeah, no, everybody needs that. You know, Leon, who was at Ford at the time and who was responsible for the Pinto, decreed that it would be kept under $2,000 brand new. And it. They managed to do that. Think about that. Imagine that a brand new car. Now, granted inflation and everything, but still $2,000 for a brand new car. Meaning that five or six years down the road, cars like that were abundant. And you know, on the used car market for kids who didn’t have a lot of money.

I mean, I just like you when I was that age, when I Was in high school I saved the money that I earned from cutting grass and shoveling snow and all that other stuff in my McDonald’s after school money so I could buy a car. Yeah, you know, everybody knows that today it’s almost impossible for a teenager to work a part time job or cut grass and be able to afford anything as far as a car goes because they’re so expensive. And that’s really tragic, it’s really sad. And it’s hurting not just teenagers who are trying to become adults, but people on the lower end of the economic spectrum.

They’re limited, their options are limited. It’s not just about, hey, I want to go for a joyride. If you can’t drive to work, your work options are limited. If you know, if you can only go wherever the bus goes or the train goes, that means you can only get certain kinds of jobs. And it probably means you’re going to have to live in an urban area. But guess what? Everything’s more expensive in the urban area than it is farther out. So really it’s a kind of an assault on the. You know, it’s ironic, isn’t it? You know, we heard from the Democrats in the left for years about the plight of the working man and the average guy.

Well, the average guy and the working man are the ones who are most being harmed by these things. And now it’s leached out farther and it’s metastasized and it’s beginning to make it very difficult for middle class people to have the standard of living that so called working class people had 50 years ago. I agree. Yeah. And it’s like, what are they, what is their end game with all this stuff? Right. Is it just to kill us all or what is it? Because it doesn’t make any sense that they keep taking everything away from everybody. They want to take away our jobs and so forth and put us on universal basic income.

You know, what is the end game with that? It is so antithetical to what Henry Ford was about. As he said, you know, we’re going to make the cars cheap enough that the people who work on the assembly line manufacture them can afford to have one. And so, you know, what is the end game for the people? They really do hate us. It’s this concentration. And that was the other aspect that these people noticed going back over 5,000 years. The frustration and the lack of sense of control over your own life. No opportunity and all the rest of this stuff, which is precisely what the agenda is for the technocracy and the people who are around Trump that, you know, Peter Thiel and these Curtis Yarvin types, they want a society that’s going to be libertarian for them and authoritarian for us.

And that’s what they’re pushing to. And it’s like, how do you think that that’s going to be sustainable? People have never put up with that in history. So, you know, they may be able to put it in for a short period of time, but I don’t think it’s going to last. Yeah, psychologically, it’s very interesting. And I think part of it is kind of a pathological thing in that it is some people, it’s not enough to have generational wealth, you know, to have enough money not only for themselves, to live without any care whatsoever about financial worries, their kids and their kids.

Kids are going to be completely taken care of. It’s never enough. How many billions do you need? Elon Musk’s net worth is, what, 60 billion or something crazy like that? I think it’s more than that. Yeah. And it’s still not enough. They need more. You know, it’s not enough to have a yacht. You have to have two yachts, then you have to have a private jet, then you have to have four. The biggest yacht you gotta have. Bigger than the billionaire next door. Yeah. And so that. It’s almost as if there’s an element of sadism in it.

It’s not that, oh, I’ve got something really nice. I’ve got, you know, I’ve got a Daimler Maybach. But my neighbor, my God, that guy has a Chevy Suburban. The guy down, you know, the guy who cuts my brass has a Chevy Suburban. I don’t want him to have that. Yeah, that’s somehow a diminishment that, you know, I feel. I. It’s only. It’s only. I only feel good if I’m the only one who has something nice. I think that’s part of, psychologically, what’s motivating all of this. That’s right. I think you’re absolutely right. That’s one of the reasons why they buy things like a Maybach, because I’m the only one that’s got a Maybach.

Right. Or they. They buy a dress or a purse that costs $4,000 or $8,000 or something. You know, it’s that exclusivity. And then there’s only so far that you can go with that exclusivity until it’s necessary for you to exclude stuff from other people. And that’s really where this is all headed. I agree, it is really a kind of a sickness that’s there, but we’ve always seen that it’s an addiction that these people have to money, the love of money. It becomes like a drug to them. It really does. There’s another interesting aspect of this, if I might elaborate just a touch, because it’s almost a cartoon indictment of capitalism, but it’s not capitalism because almost all of these people, and in almost every case, they are acquiring their wealth through government.

That’s right. First thing we talked about when I had you on was your article about Elon Musk being the king of crony capitalism. That was more than a decade ago we first talked about that. And that, as you pointed out, was how he got his wealth. I said that earlier in the program. I said, you know, you look at this, and so many times you see people who are libertarian or conservative and they want to champion businesses and say business can do nothing wrong and government can do nothing right. And then the Democrats are the other way.

Right. Government can do nothing wrong. Businesses and private companies can do nothing Right. The reality is that they’ve merged and that’s what makes it all so evil. And they don’t see that. You know, they imagine that we’ve got a free market or that we have capitalism, but it’s not that at all. It’s this kind of mixture that we see in China, and we recognize it in China, how they come in and say, well, you’re going to have to give us a piece of that. But we’re seeing that in spades now with Trump, you know, he’s using, taking over, buying a share of intel and using government money to start, you know, acquiring assets to own it.

I mean, that is socialism, Marxism, central planning. All the things that Republicans used to oppose, they now applaud because Trump is doing it. Yep. They’ve so poisoned the well. And in addition to that, younger Americans in particular don’t know their own history. That’s right. Henry Ford can be considered a capitalist. Henry Ford figured out a way to make a better mousetrap, and he didn’t use the government at all to subsidize his business. What he did was to make a product that people could afford. And a very interesting thing about Ford was that the Model T got progressively less expensive with each model year because he would fine tune it, figure out ways to make it cost less, and he was able to scale things up and he sold more of them so he could make more on volume than on individual unit sales.

Yeah, it was such a boon for average people because it liberated them from the yoke of having to be tied to an urban area, to a city. A farmer could buy a Ford Model T and he could use it as a tractor. They made it to be modular so, you know, you could. You could have it out on the farm. And gasoline, of course, was portable. So even in the time before there were gas stations, you could bring gas to where there wasn’t any gas. And, you know, we’ve taken this for granted as a civilization, this idea that we can just go where we want to go.

That was not the case once. You know, it was almost kind of a feudal order where you were stuck where you were by circumstances. And, you know, the dawn of that age change that. And now we’re reverting back to that age and we’re being dragged back into it because most people just don’t appreciate just how good we had it. And they might once it’s all gone. That’s right. That’s right. Well, you know, a lot of this comes, and I’ve mentioned many times, there was an op ed piece that really dropped my jaw when I saw it by the CEO of Lyft.

I can’t remember his name, I don’t know if he’s still the CEO, but the guy had been an urban planner by education. And so he loved cities. And he said, cities are the best invention of mankind and cars are the worst invention. And I thought, this is just so upside down and backwards. Nobody agrees with that in reality, because the reason that we have suburbs and the reason that we have what these urban planners derisively call urban sprawl is because people don’t like living all pressed up against each other, and they’re willing to spend time and money so they can get more space around them.

But they hate that because these urban planners are all about control. And when you look at the. We look at Lyft and you look at Uber, you know, they were all about owning all of the transportation privately, right? And making it kind of a fascist run system, not directly owned by the government, as if they would own all the buses and the rails and subways like that. But the fact that they would partner with government to make sure, you know, they do whatever government wants them to do. If the government tells them that David Knight can’t ride anywhere, they would enforce that for them.

And so they’re all about that and that kind of a partnership that we see there. And they’re all about getting rid of, as Travis Kalalnik of Uber used to say the reason our rides are expensive is because that other dude in the car, we’re going to get rid of that other dude in the car. We’re going to have self driving cars. That’s where we want to go. So who’s going to be able to afford to drive in these things? Right? Because it’s not just one sector with artificial intelligence or robotics and everything, they’re going for every sector all at once.

They’re trying to reduce. There’s an MIT report saying that they could get rid of, I forget how many tens of millions of jobs, but it was massive. It was like maybe 20 million jobs or something. We think we can replace 20 million jobs right now with AI if we get really serious about this and we build the data centers. Well, they’d love to do that because it’ll increase their profit margin, will reduce their health care costs. Something else though, you mentioned how this guy, the Lyft guy says that cities are bad. And it’s cities are good.

Cities are good. It’s an unconscious confession, his subjective value. He personally thinks that cities are great and he personally thinks that it’s bad to not live, you know, in them and doesn’t even appreciate that other people might have a different point of view. And if they have a different point of view, you know, theirs should be stopped. You know, they shouldn’t be allowed to have their different point of view. That’s the, that’s the mentality of the people that we’re dealing with. They can’t live and let live. They can’t say, okay, I’ve got a point of view.

I like living in an urban hive. I like living in an apartment. You go ahead and live in the country, you know, Billy, if you want to. They can’t do that. That whole, that whole American idea that we used to have of live and let live, different strokes for different folks, it’s just being exterminated by this, this, this arrogant, one size fits all, everybody’s going to do the same thing mentality. I agree. Yeah, I like EVs. So you’re going to use an EV, right? I’m going to demand that you use it. There’s not going to be any other exception.

Yeah, I’ve got a couple of comments here. Birdhouse Blue says I don’t even recognize the cars today. They all look the same. That’s absolutely right. And that’s not by accident. The reason they all look the same is because they all have to comply with the same federal regulations. And that greatly Limits the ability of designers to come up with anything different. Yes. It’s kind of like the best way to understand it. If you follow cop racing, they literally have this template. It’s this thing that they put over the body of the car. The car has to be within those parameters in order to be legal to use on the track.

So that’s why the NASCAR cars all look the same. No matter whether it says Toyota or Ford or whatever, they all look the same. And that’s the reason why when you go to a car showroom, pretty much all the cars look like they got stamped out of the same factory and a different badge got put on the fender. Yeah, yeah. He also has a comment. He says cars used to have character. You know, you’re talking about that. That reminds me of the Superbird. And I think it was Richard Petty that did that. Remember that? It had.

And they actually sold that for consumers. I had a friend of mine in high school, his dad bought him a Roadrunner Superbird and had that long extension on the front, and it had like the spoiler on the back that was like five feet above the trunk and everything. It was crazy that he was driving this around on the road, but he could do it. You know, it was a 200 mile an hour car. And the really cool thing about stock car racing in those days was that they literally were stock cars in the sense that they took a production car, you know, and they turned it into a race car.

Now, the cars that you see on a NASCAR circuit, they’re all the same tube frame chassis underneath with this skin on the top that’s supposed to vaguely kind of remind you of a Ford, or it’s not anything at all remotely like a car that you can buy at the dealership, whereas back in the day, like your friend did, you could buy basically Richard Petty’s car version of Richard Petty’s car. And that’s why they used to say, win on Sunday, sell on Monday. And it was true, because you went to the race and if you were a Chevy guy and you watched the Chevy win the race, or a Dodge guy, whatever, you were happy about that and you wanted to be associated with that.

So you went and bought that car because you thought it was a winner because it won the race. And there was truth in that. Yeah. Now you know motorsports, at least as far as NASCAR goes. I know I’m going to get some hate for this, but I consider it to be the World Wrestling Federation of Motorsports. That’s a good way to put it. That’s funny. Every time I see John in his car, you know, he was really nice guy. And the funny thing about it, he was not the kind of guy that would show off and he didn’t do that with anything else.

And he was actually. I always felt that he was embarrassed when people noticed his car. He’s like, yeah, my dad bought a car, but it was so out of character. It was amazing. Yeah, those cars, those, those, those Daytona Superbirds. Yeah. Those cars now are hundreds of thousands of dollars if you want to buy one. Now back in the day when, when they were available, the dealers, they couldn’t sell them. A lot of times they would sit on the lot and you know, they would eventually get fire sold to somebody for a budget price because like your friend, people felt a little awkward driving around in this thing with this huge wing on the back, you know, and that bullet nose that it had on the front.

Yeah, yeah. Extended it like. Yeah. How are you gonna park that anywhere? I assume that you didn’t use that for your parallel parking driving test. It never fit in the parking space. It was, it was crazy. And it was always a lot of fun to see him. And I hope he didn’t wreck it. Maybe if he kept it. He’s got a lot of money now he could get for that. But yeah, as Birdhouse Blue also says, I used to buy many used cars for 500 or less back in the 80s. Even. That’s true, you know, but let’s talk a little bit about you got an article just came out this week.

A solution for a created problem. Tell us about that. Oh, yeah, well, we all have experienced the frustration of sitting at a traffic light and the light in front of us goes green. And as soon as you cross the intersection up ahead, there’s another light and it just went red. Oh yeah. So you know, signal timing, it’s a problem, but it’s a problem that’s easily remedied by timing the signals so that generally speaking, on a given stretch of road, most of the lights will go green sequentially in order so that the traffic can flow well, instead of just doing it the simple way.

Now, one of these tech bro companies associated with the University of Michigan has proposed the fine idea of collating and collecting data being transmitted from your car, your GPS data and other data, so that the system recognizes how many cars are on a given stretch of road at a given time, how fast they’re moving. And they can use AI to coordinate the lights. Of course, really what this is about again is monitoring you collecting Data about you. They swear up and down on a stack of brave new worlds that it’s anonymized data. But of course, it’s not.

It’s only anonymized because they choose it to be anonymized. All of this is tied particularly to your car. People don’t realize, most people don’t know that pretty much all cars out made within the last 10 or 15 years have what they call telematics, which means that they are constantly in communication with the hive. I call it the hive. They’re receiving updates. They’re transmitting this, and you have no consent and no ability to thwart that. And it’s quite remarkable that there hasn’t been more outrage, at least as far as I’m concerned. I don’t like the idea of my car being like my cell phone in that it’s.

It is controlled by some corporate entity somewhere that can decide that it wants to update it, that is, change it, or that it can use this device to track my movements, not because I’m a criminal, but because I have. I don’t want people knowing where I’m going. That’s reasonable. You know, I don’t feel like I ought to have an ankle bracelet on unless I’ve actually been convicted of a crime. That’s right. You know, there was an interesting thing reported on the last couple of weeks, and there was a guy who was pushing back against a bunch of statists who were pushing for some new safety devices or something to be made mandatory on cars.

And this is a guy who, before he became a politician, he used to sell cars. And so he decided he would go around and see if these people actually had bought these safety devices that were optional on their car. So he went around and got their vin number numbers for their cars, looked it up, and found out that these people who were saying, you absolutely have to have this stuff had declined paying for it when they had the option to and were going to use their money. So he said, so now you’re going to force everybody to buy what you chose not to buy when you had the opportunity to do it.

And their reaction to it was like, how dare you get my vin number and look this stuff up. You violated my privacy. And I thought this is. Is the most hypocritical thing you can imagine. These are the people who are spying on us with everything, as you point out, in our car and all the rest of it. Of course, there’s also the massive flock network of cameras that are out there doing automated license plate readings and not just the license plate, but they are creating an ID profile of your car, looking at the idiosyncrasies of it.

Does it have a dent on the side or a scratch or this or that? And tracking that, literally tracking it for law enforcement all the time and doing that as a contract and that is exploding. That’s a kind of, you know, public private tyranny that we see over and over again. And I thought it was just the most amazing. I played that clip a couple of weeks ago, within the last couple of weeks. And the attitude of these people, how dare you do this one? They are mandating stuff for people and they are spying on people all the time.

It’s really interesting to me that, you know, this gets us into the subject of the driver assistance technology, which is related to it. Why is it that it is made standard equipment now in every vehicle, even though the overwhelming majority of people do not want this? I can’t tell you how many times I get emails and comments whenever I do shows like yours. People say, you know, I despise being parented by my car. I don’t like lane keep assistance, I don’t like any of that. I want to turn it off. You can’t turn it off anymore.

All you can do is turn it down. And it’s interesting that these manufacturers who you think would not want to alienate their customers. Why would you put something in a vehicle that most people don’t want? Yeah, well, it’s because they want it. And then the question is beg, well, why do they want it? And I think the reason is because there’s just gradually piece by piece putting together this system in which you will have no control over your car, beyond which, beyond what they want you to have. So the minute that you go outside the parameters of that, you know, the car will correct you.

And it may get to the point where it just shuts off or it doesn’t operate at all if you don’t operate it within the allowable parameters. And at that point we might as well just all sign up for a Johnny cab, which is ultimately, I think what they really do want. It is, it is. And that’s why these, these car companies have been partnerships in a partnership with government to add all these expensive add ons and all these things that people don’t want because that drives the price of the car up and they can charge people for that.

And. But the problem is, is that they’ve kind of, you know, one thing that Vladimir Lenin got right was he said the capitalists will Sell the rope that’s used to hang them. And this was being used to hang these guys now is, you know, they sold all these safety device ropes to rope you in. And now their cars are so expensive people can’t afford it. But then of course the solution to that is to get even more into a relationship and a partnership with the government so that they are the providers with this mobility stuff that’s going to be privately owned but will be heavily controlled.

And there’ll be a. The government will tell them what to do and of course you’ll have the politicians who will get to wet their beak as the mafia people say. That’s basically how this is going to operate. It’s going to be the Chinese model. That’s why they opened up China for this type of stuff. Inevitably too. To speak to your point about not seeing their own self interest, there will have to be a winnowing of the number of manufacturers because it just doesn’t make sense to have as many manufacturers as there still are producing essentially the same thing.

Why not consolidate everything kind of like they did in the Soviet Union, where you could get a lot of. Maybe after, you know, after 15 or 20 years on a waiting list, it’s going to be. Or Trabant. You know, those were your choices back in the old Soviet days. And ultimately I see something like that happening. You know, Philip Dick, the great sci fi writer, foresaw this. If you read his novel Blade Runner, they don’t get into it. Or the novel is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. The movie Blade Runner is the one that people are more familiar with.

But in the novel, everything is controlled by what’s called the Turrell Corporation. Yeah, everything. It’s sort of like, you know, the Amazon of our time. It’s just this, every single consumer good is made and manufactured by this one pyramidal structured, massive corporation that controls everything, you know, and you wrote that book decades and decades and decades ago. And here we are, you know, it very prescient in the way it foresaw what corporatism would turn capitalism into. All these dystopian novels have become a manual for these people, I think. Yeah, you talk about. You’d wait for decades for that.

That was one of the best Ronald Reagan jokes. Basically in Russia, right? The guy orders, I don’t know if it has a car. Let’s just say it’s a washing machine. And he goes, we’ll have that for you in 10 years. And the guy says, afternoon or morning? Morning. And he says, why do you ask? It’s ten years from now. He goes, well, because I’ve got the dishwasher coming in the morning ten years from now. Because those of us who can remember the way America used to be, you know, never thought America would become like the Soviet Union.

That’s right. And yet we’re rapidly on our way to becoming exactly that. Well, you know, it’s even to the extent that you’ve got a lot of these conservative influencers. And again, these are not people who are researchers and not reporters. They’re not journalists, they are influencers. That ought to tell you something. But they’re out there trying to rehabilitate Richard Nixon of all people, our 55 mile an hour guy who created the EPA and so many other issues out there. And he opened us up to China and he set us down on this path. And I said, you know, think about it conservatives, if you like Richard Nixon, you gotta like Henry Kissinger, Mr.

Globalism himself, you know, but it’s amazing how this is all, you know, it’s a long term plan that they’ve been operating on. You know, with regard to what we talked about at the beginning of the interview, the federal fuel economy standards, you know, I think it’s the best way to challenge that is to say why is the government involved in that at all? Yeah, that’s right. I mean, what businesses is it of the government to decree to you or I how many miles per gallon a vehicle that we choose to buy with our own money? Yeah.

Must get. Where is that in the Constitution? And where is the authority for the EPA in the Constitution? Right. And it’s based on a fatuity. You know, the argument is that if the government weren’t doing this, then the mean old automakers would make nothing but gas guzzling cars and we’d all be at the mercy of big oil. It’s nonsense. Before Cafe came along in the early 70s, there were plenty of fuel efficient cars available. Yeah. So it’s a lie. And you know, these, these mandates that are coming out, the cafe thing costs you money. Yeah. Your car gets 35 miles per gallon, but it also costs $40,000 now.

So you’re really not saving any money because you’ve got this micro engine turbocharged hybrid augmented thing with a CVT transmission and yay, I’m getting, you know, five miles more per gallon than I, you know, than the vehicle that costs thousands and thousands of thousands of dollars left. Less. But you know, I guess people just can’t do basic math anymore so they buy into this nonsense that’s Right. Yeah. I like this op ed piece that you, you put out. The last generation put this out yesterday. You started by saying, before the 90s, men drove cars and kids rode bicycles without helmets.

Now men, well, wear helmets to ride a bicycle. And kids aren’t allowed to ride in a car unless they’re strapped in a safe seat. You know, that, that is the amazing thing. You know, Travis just had to get a car seat for their son. And of course, you know, they’re talking about, well, this is going to last up until, you know, whatever the age is. And, and you know, they make the cars so that they have different inserts that you can put in when they’re small, when they can keep staying in that car seat forever, you know, as they, they get older and older.

It’s true, it’s amazing, it’s terrible. And you know, one of the, one of the hidden costs of that, by the way, with regard to the safety seat mandate, it effectively pushes people to buy a three row SUV at some point or a crossover. Because if you got more than two kids, you know, it becomes just too difficult to fit the seats in the back of the thing. Yeah. So you need that. So then you have to move up and buy this much more expensive vehicle. You know, I, I, you know, I just, I, I miss the days.

You know, when we were kids, you went for a drive, mom and dad, you open the door, just jump in the car and go, yeah, now you gotta go. You gotta be able to get in the car and get them into the car seat and all the rest of this stuff. I mean, we just used to climb in these cars. They didn’t have seat belts, they didn’t have padded dashboards or anything. We used to joke about it even when in high school, you know, they started putting in the seat belts. They weren’t mandatory yet. And we used to laugh about it.

So yeah, we used to just, somebody have an accent. We just hustle the blood off the dashboard and sell the car again. Sure. You know, I understand that there is an increased risk. I know some people listening to us might be appalled at what I’m suggesting here. But I think it’s gotten to be almost neurotic. No, I think it is neurotic. It is over top fear that pervades our society about what might happen. You know, heaven forfend. You know, you get in a car and drive down to the mailbox without your seatbelt on, you know, you might die.

This is the attitude that people have now. And it’s just, it’s over the top. And it’s silly. And just on a moral level, if you’re an adult, you don’t need to be parented. Presumably, you’re grown up. So ease off. Leave me alone. I’ll make decisions. I’ll weigh costs, benefits, risks and reward for myself. You have no right to parent another adult. That’s right. Yeah. They would be absolutely appalled to see what happens in China when we were there, like 20 years ago. You know, you got somebody, the family, they don’t have an suv, they don’t have a car, they got a motorcycle.

And they just tell the little kids that are maybe, you know, four years old, just hang on, you know, there’s no seatbelt. There’s nothing there. Somehow they managed to survive. I used to always laugh about the magic school bus. When they would come on and they would start by saying, seat belts. Everybody said, there’s no seat belts on a school bus. They cover them with laws and yellow paint to make sure that nobody gets hurt. You know, it’s always great talking to you, Eric. We’re out of time. That went by really, really fast, as it always does.

Thank you so much. Ericpeters.com Check it out, folks. Great site for news. Thank you, David. Appreciate it. Thank. You. The Common Man. They created Common Core that dumbed down our children. They created Common past to track and control us. Their Commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing. And the communist future. They see the common man as simple, unsophisticated, ordinary. But each of us has worth and dignity created in the image of God. That is what we have in common. That is what they want to take away. Their most powerful weapons are isolation, deception, intimidation.

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