There is always great to have Eric on. We've been talking about Elon Musk and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and all these other scams for the longest time, and of courses site ep autos dot com a great site for all things about liberty and mobility because you can't have one without the other, actually, quite frankly, and they're trying to restrict both of those things free speeches that they really have. Everybody on both sides are really targeting
free speech. It's truly amazing. But joining us now is Zarak. Peter's good to have you Eric, Thanks for joining us.
Thank you.
David is exasperating, isn't it to have to just constantly construct the language.
I was listening to you.
A little bit before about while we were waiting to go on, and you were talking about this business with the strike and the unions, and it occurred to me that there's sort of a rough analogy there between the way we're represented by senators and congressman.
Right.
I mean, you don't have the option to say no, and that based.
An oxymoron, because you know, if you don't have the proxy power to tell your so called representative do this and only this and do not do that. And by the way, I only want you to do it. If I say okay, then he's not representing you. He's presuming to represent you. And that's a distinction and that I think is important to me.
Oh yeah, it's very much like politics. You know. I didn't have any He never asked me, are you gonna hate down there? You know, you want to change any of this stuff. I hated the way that they had this stuff structured. And it wasn't even just the wage levels.
It was also, you know, the ways that they would have they would mandate how the fees are supposed to be split up within the band, and that's one of the ways that they would get the band leader who actually owned the band to sign up with the union because he'd get a double share, you know, and all of a sudden kinds so they give these little incentives to people to work with them, to join with them, and then you either, you know, you either do that
or you can't have a job. And so yeah, it is a very rigged process that we see with all that stuff.
It's like I'm off youa you know, and and I've been covering this stuff for thirty years in the car industry. It's the same thing. I don't necessarily have an issue with unions per se, provided that they are voluntary. If you wish to join a union, that's fine, that's your prerogative. You should certainly have that right. But there's something just surreal almost about like you said, if you want to have this job, you.
Must join this union.
You must hand over money to these people who then presume to be your representative somehow. I mean, it's doubly obnoxious because they are presuming to represent you and then they're taking money out of your pocket, and they're using threats of extortion that if you don't do this, we're going to you know, we're going to just kick.
You out of here, and you're not going to have a job.
That's right. Yeah, we have some right to work states where you are not required to they can't require you to join the union to have a job. But then we have some states where that's not there. And in the situation that I was in in the music union, you were really required to do it because if they didn't hire all union people, then that restaurant or whatever, that club would get blackballed by the union, and they
couldn't get anyway. So it's this this coersive collectivist thing, you know, and every level, the way they would twist people's arms. I really really did hate it.
When I started my career back in the print days, the the people who were in the composing room, which was the place for back in the day, they would physically put the pages of the newspaper together. They would the machine would spit out, you're familiar with that. And one time I happened to be down there and I happened to glance at something on the editorial page of the dummy that for the morning's paper, and I noticed that there was something missing, that somehow a sentence had
been cut out. So on my own I went ahead and spat out the machine a new piece of thing, and I put it in and there was practically a tactical nuclear explosion that I you know, who was supposed to be upstairs and the editorial offices had dared to trespass upon the you know, the fiefdoms of these union people.
I mean, it was a big deal. Oh it was a huge, big deal. And said, hey, okay, great, thank you for fixing that for us.
Oh yeah, And they do that with conventions still to this. You know, people had come in and they would have booths to set up. And I've been involved on both sides of that, both as an attendee of the conventions and somebody's setting up. You don't do certain things. You got to wait for the particular union representative to come there and give you an extension court and you better not do anything else without calling one of these electrical union representatives.
It weren't so tragic because we're all paying for this. One of the reasons why the cost that everything is going through the roof is because you've thought all of this dead weight and all of this inertia and bureaucracy that has to be overcome before anything can get done.
Yeah, that's right, Well, it absolutely is crazy. I sent you this clip of a of a Tesla charging station that has submerged. They got all these Tesla chargers and they're standing in water, and the caption says, you thought smoking it the gas pump was risky? You want to go, boy.
We can attack this from so many different angles. One of them is that when those when there's a danger of a flood, they will shut off the high voltage electricity to things like the electric chargers because of the obvious danger that that presents. So now you've got the problem of well, I've gotten my electric vehicle, how am I going to get out of the path of the hurricane before, you know, before.
I get killed?
And you can't because they've shut the current off to it. Oh and if that hasn't happened yet, So you're sitting there with waiting while the water is rising, rising, rising, you know. And if you wait there too long, then then your electric car is going to go up and smoke. I just posted an article about it. For all videos coming out of the areas that were affected by the aftermath of the hurricane that show electric cars erupting in flames,
there's one in Florida. There's another one that I've got in the article on the site. And the reason for that I thought of a really clever at least I thought it was a way to understand this. Do you remember the original Star Wars where Little destroys the Death Star by exploiting the Death Star's weakness. There's a ventilation duck that he fires in the missile and it goes into the ventilation duck and it goes to the very core of the dust Star and blows it up. These are kind
of like that. They have a vent for that battery and if the water new fence and gets in there, then boom, there goes to the death star.
The last thing you hear is are two D two goo and then pop. Yeah, it is it's funny when we look at this stuff, but it absolutely is crazy and uh and yet you know when you look at this, one of the things that you talk about all the time is electric power windows, and it made me think about this. I've got a friend who's got a Tesla. He loves it. I've driven the Tesla. I enjoyed driving it. I wouldn't want to own one because the charging issues, expense issues and things like that, but I really did
enjoy driving. It was a very different experience because you know, with a m Mark, with a Miata, it's a momentum car, right, you don't have a whole lot of horsepower, so you want to keep that momentum through the curves and all the rest of the stuff. Right. But with that car, you know, it's just like you step on the gas. It's like it's like when you would run the electric slot cars. When I was a kid, right, you move the lever and it's you know, and then when you
pull the level immediately stops. And that's the way this thing is. So it's really kind of a strange thing. But he got stuck in his Tesla because he couldn't get the doors to open because everything is under control, and he was stuck in this car and had to get had to call Tesla and get them to sign into his car whatever and fix his car remotely so he could get out of it. But you know, it's not even that's a worst case scenario. We're talking about
a flood or something like that. Can you imagine, you know, it gets everything is under software control, all of a sudden, you got some water there. Now the computer's not working, you can't get out of the door, and then it's and then even in other cars, not even in a Tesla or an EV. You've got a situation where now almost all cars have electric windows. And I think about
that with a fly. Years ago, we used to do product videos for a company that did promotional products, and it was a very big thing, especially in Europe and Germany. People would want to have these little things. They would be like maybe a you know, a bottle opener and a thing to smash your window, or a flashlight and the thing to smash your window. But it was always it always had this, you know, pointed metal tip so you could use it to break the window and get
out in case your car went into water. Because everybody had electric windows. And it really is crazy when we make ourselves with the complexity we put ourselves at the mercy of these types of things. You know, I was It wasn't until my fifth car that I had electric windows. They were all manual cranks. But now it's standard. Even the cheap cars got electric windows well.
And they've compounded the problem on Tesla. And it's not just Tesla, some other manufacturers are doing this too. They are laminating the side glass.
Now.
You know, we shield glasses laminated because you don't want the glass to shatter in the event that you have in accident. The problem is needing side glasses. You can't break it, you know, now your car. That poor woman what was she use? Sister in law of the Secretary of Transportation, somebody I remember who it chose, I think what her name was. This happened a few months ago. She was leading a party. I guess in her tesla, and she inadvertently backed up into a pond to remember this.
She ended up there.
Browning and it was so emotion She would have had plenty of time to get out of the car ordinarily, but she couldn't because aid of the windows wouldn't go down and apparently the side glasses land made so the people who were trying to get her out of there couldn't smash the glass, and she ended up browning and dying.
Wow, because the door is under software control, that type of thing. It truly is amazing when we see this and again as part of the cost that we have to pay because everybody's got the electric windows. It's absolutely insane.
You said there.
I'm sorry to interrupt. I just wanted to make because I do think it's important. There is a subtle cost that we're all paying in the form of increased insurance costs for all of this stuff.
You know.
And I don't have an issue with somebody who has the money and wants to go out and buy a fifty thousand or seventy thousand dollars vehicle that has all of these electronics and power accessories and so on, but they ought to pay the full cost for covering that. I don't have a vehicle like that, and I don't see why I ought to help, as they say, shoulder the cost of that.
But yet we are.
We're also paying for the costs incurred by all of these evs and the fires that are happening when an eed burns down in a garage and takes the house out along with it.
Now, not only do.
You have to replace a fifty or sixty thousand dollars electric car, you have to replace a half a million dollars worth of property damage on top of that.
Yeah, yeah, oh absolutely. And when we talk about insurance companies looking for excuses to raise the rates and everything the stuff that's I reported on it, but it was a far more extensive video talking about the way that the car manufacturers have a spot on us in so many different ways, and how they're constantly sending reports to the insurance companies. People are like, how come my insurance
rates doubled and anything. They got to the bottom of it, and they found that there was this dossier that was compiled and sent to the insurance company about all this stuff. And of course the automobile companies are making a lot of money by collecting the data and then selling it to the insurance companies, and insurance companies can then raise your rates for any kind of arbitrary thing. Well you you stop too quickly. Well maybe I stopped quickly because
the car in front of me stopped quickly. You know. It's they don't even they can't even validate the reason for doing this, but they just have to have a pretense. And so, yeah, the insurance costs are going through the roof. The cars are actually surveillance devices. Now, they're not just as you and I've been talking about for a long time. It's like a giant smartphone. It's got all these bells
and whistles and gadgets on it and everything. But just like a smartphone, it's constantly surveilling and reporting on you. And that that also is incredibly disgusting what these people are.
I look at another way too, it's a metric of the decline of civilization. I mean in the sense of civility, and that there's something really barbarous about your privacy being invaded in the effrontery and the arrogance of the car companies that will do that to you, you know, and they do it, and they do it, you know, in a way that is really greasy, and they don't tell you there's no informed consent. They don't say, hey, by the way, your cars equipped with cameras and microphones, would
you mind, would it be okay with you? You know, if we if we collected this data because it might be helpful to us and to you, YadA, YadA, YadA. You don't have that opportunity.
They just do it.
I mean, in my mind, no different than somebody just marching into your house is having to look around, yeah, you know, just because they can or.
They conceal it. And that's massive terms of service type of thing, right and change it. You know, by the way, you didn't notice this, but you clicked okay on this. You've got an article talking about hybrids. Don't buy a hybrid, you said, And this is the thing that people are kind of you know, the car companies are really pushing this because nobody wants to buy a car that they have to that they only have the option of charging.
It takes a long time, it's expensive, but you know, they're they're moving towards the hybrids because it's like, well, all right, it's a little bit less. But that's not going to satisfy the regulators, and only you can down the road just a little bit, because people will not attack this lie at its foundation, which is the CO two stuff. Because of that, everybody is trying to ignore the elephant in the room, the massive lie, and they're trying to comply with it one way or the other
without really rocking the boat. But talk about why you say hybrids are not a great thing for people.
Well, let's start with what you just said in that essentially, they're not addressing the fundamental issue. They're hoping that they can comply their way out of this, like the people who continue to wear the face masks during the pandemic, which just imply our way out of this.
Right.
No, they won't because eventually it's not going to be good enough, and they'll come up with yet another reason to outlaw the hybrids. Hybrids and I don't have an issue with them as such, but they are fundamentally compliance fars. What do I mean by that, Well, they are the only realistic way to achieve high gas mileage at this point because the government has issued regulations that have increased the weight of cars to such a degree that it's
almost unbelievable. Compact cars now were typically close to three thousand pounds, and that's the reason why they get, relatively speaking, pretty poor gas mileage. Most of them get maybe thirty five, maybe forty miles per gallon on the highway. Maybe that's pretty awful when you reflect and go back forty years and find that cars were doing better than that forty years ago. And the reason they were doing better than that without all the technology that we have today's because
they were light. Simple. You know, it's just that simple. So hybrids are a way to advertise higher gas knowledge. But of course you're paying for that when you buy the hybrid. You know, a Toyota Prius starts around twenty eight thousand bucks, so great, you know, it gets fifty six miles for gallon, but you're paying ten thousand dollars more, roughly than you would have to pay for, let's say
an entry level economy car if it were light. And if that entry level economy car got fifty or sixty miles per gallon, you just saved ten thousand dollars and a lot of money down the road and gas too.
So and the other thing that I get into in the article is the sort of subtle and hit more hidden cost in that, just like an electric car, eventually it will take longer, but eventually the battery in the electric car is going to wear out, and it's a battery in the hybrid is going to wear out, and eventually you will have to replace it if you keep the car beyond the point when that battery is no longer serviceable, and you're looking at potentially two thousand dollars
for the battery plus the cost of labor. So there it goes with a resaved in gas right there too. No, it's just all of this artificiality, all of these these solutions to problems that are created by government. It's like that old saw about the guy who breaks your legs and then gives you some crutches so that you can hobble down the road a little bit.
And I think probably a good analogy for the hybrids is hybrids are like preferred pronouns.
Yes, that's a really good rid.
If you play along with it, they're only going to come up with something else. So just stop it right now and call it for what it is. It's insanity, it's lunacy. I'm not playing along with this game. I'm not playing your preferred hybrid. Your preferred hybrids are your
preferred pronouns either. I love what you put in your article that those who rationalize this loss of time or range or pick are like the Parsons, the character in the in Orwell's nineteen eighty four who eagerly tout how Big Brother has increased the chocolate ration while everybody knows that has actually been reduced.
Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean it's it is a form of derangement, you know, I have to deal with this on an almost the early basis. The evy apologists say things like, oh, well, I don't have to wait because I'm at home doing other things all my electric car charges. Well, that's like saying, you know, I've got I've got a contractor. He said he's going to come
sometime between twelve and six today. But I guess I'll do something else, you know, around the house while I'm waiting for the sky to show.
They're still waiting.
I mean, the fact that you're doing something else while you wait doesn't change the fact that you're waiting. When you go to the dentist and you're sitting in the waiting room, reading the magazine you're waiting for the dentists.
Yeah.
Yeah.
When we look at this and where this is all going, you and I have talked about for the longest time. They're going to get everybody loaded up with evs and then they're going to shut down power grid. Well, that's already happening. We've talked about that for years, and now
they're rolling it out. Because now the EPA is setting its sites on the power companies that can be relied, on the power companies that are cheap, we'll be able to have some unreliable power that is going to be four to ten times more expensive than what we're paying each month. You got one hundred and fifty dollars bill, how about a fifteen hundred dollars a month bill, Because that's what you're going to get if we keep going down this road of this renewable grift, and that's what
it is, is nothing other than a grift. You're going to wind up with something between one thousand and two thousand dollars every month just for electricity, and you're going to have brownouts and rationing and all the rest of the stuff. And they want everybody to put everything on the grid, but they're not going to put their critical systems on the grid. Their critical systems are artificial intelligence
to surveil us, to propagandize us, to censor us. They're going to have their own separate power grid for that. But we're already seeing what you and I knew was going to happen. Move everybody over to the one preferred, the only allowed solution quote unquote to their imagined problem, just like with a vaccine, and then shut that down. And that's what it's already happening now.
I think it's even worse than a mere grift, which would be bad, but you know, it's of a piece with some scam guy who takes your money and all you lost is your money. This is more significant because it's not just our money that they're after. They're after not only our freedom, they're after our basic quality of life.
You know, things that we have.
Taken for granted in this country for a very long time, like a refrigerator that works like hot water.
In the house.
It's not just the cars, it's energy. All this stuff has to do ultimately with rationing energy. It's not just the cars, it's everything they want to insurf us by reducing the availability of energy, either through outright rationing or through prices that are so high that most people just can't afford it in need.
Oh yeah, absolutely. I've got a comment here from ratisbro and thank you for the tip. I appreciate that says I've delivered more than seven hundred Amazon packages in three days. I don't work for Amazon, only make nineteen eighty three. The post office is still out of contract. No one is being paid fairly. Who does a real job. That's right,
They're just going to use people. You know. It's the same type of thing, Eric, that I said for the longest time when I talk about Travis Kalalnik, who is the founder CEO of Uber, and he sod, the reason that the reason that the Uber is expensive for you is because that other guy in the car, you know, the guy who owns the car, the guy who pays all of the maintenance and the gas and all the
rest of the stuff. That guy's making your ride expensive. No, Travis Kalalnick and that corporation was getting largely a free ride off of this guy while they were working to set up their own cars and eliminate all drivers. It's just amazing how they manipulate people like that.
It's absolutely spicule. Yeah, most of the people who are trying to streak up a living doing lubering and that sort of thing arly just that just barely screeping out of living. Whereas in the past, you know, if you called it a taxi driver, the taxi driver probably made a pretty decent living, you know, because the car was provided by the company. You know, he's working for the company, and the company took care of all the fleet maintenance stuff, not your personal vehicle.
It's really a bad deal to.
Use your personal car for something like that because you're putting miles on it, your wear and tearing it. You're paying for the fuel, the insurance and everything else, and you know you're making fifteen twenty bucks an hour, and it's going to end up not being a really good deal once you do the math.
That's right. Well, you have people who it was actually a small business. You know, it was a small business, like somebody would open up a barbershop or hair salon or an al salon or something like that. That's the kind of stuff that's left for us because Wall Street and trying to have taken over manufacturing and other things like that. Even most of the retail store so service businesses are kind of what's left. And so you had a lot of people who invested money into a taxi medallion, a
license that was sold by the city. I remember doing a report. I was taking a taxi in Washington and I was talking to a guy about that, and it was maybe about eight or nine years ago, and he just, you know, started renting. I said, wait a minit, wait a minute, let me get my phone and I let him rent about what was happening, and he was furious. In Washington, d C. Said, yeah, they've got their own inspectors who come around and give a white glove inspection
to your car. And he goes and if that isn't bad enough, that we got our own special police ticketing agency that is there. He said, if that's not bad enough, they're now going to require that you can't have a car that's got that's older than this number of years or has more than this number of miles. And this is before Gavin Newsom started doing that to diesel to semi trailers out in California, that we're going to the ports.
But they said, you're going to require that we have a new car, and he goes, I take care of this. He goes, yeah, I've got a couple hundred thousand miles on it. But he says, this thing is running fine. I don't want to spend and I can't spend the money to buy a new taxi. And so they're seeing their the value of their medallion. These people invest a lot of money in this to get a license. That was their overhead cost to start their business, and now
that is eviscerated. Absolutely sure, I want you there be a license for such things I mean across exactly.
Yeah.
I mean if I want to provide a serves to people and people are willing to pay me, that should be a legal activity.
The fact that that is in illegal.
Activity as such, because we're not talking about any abuse, We're not talking about anybody being ripped, offerating harms, being costs. We're talking about a voluntary transaction between two willing parties. Why is the government involved in these things?
Yes, right, Yeah, that's a taxi license scamm in and of itself, just already decade. Soel you go back to when there was a vibrant black middle class in the cities and One of the things that was helping them with that was the taxis would say, well, we're not going to go in the black sections of town. So quickly you started having people start providing the taxi service to their neighbors, and all of a sudden you had
this JiTT andy taxi service type of thing. And then the cities come sweeping in and so we better pay a license for that kind of stuff. Shut all that stuff down. It was a classic case of entrepreneurism and a vibrant middle class that was working within the community. They can't have that. Everybody's got to pay them, you know, render to Caesar whatever Caesar demands.
It's like, it's literally a revivification of feudalism in which you had to be part of the guild in order to practice whatever the trade was that you had, and if you didn't, if you operated outside of the guild, that was an offence and you could be you could be attacked and prosecuted for that. And it's a crazy thing when you think about it. You've got I've got a service, I've got a skill, i can do something. I'm saying, hey, would you like me to do this
for you? And you say Yeah, that sounds good. I'll pay you. That's between us. It shouldn't be between anybody else period, you know, especially if nobody neither party is alleging that anybody's been defrauded or harmed in any way.
That's right. And of course, you know, fifty sixty years ago, that was where the fight was. Now the fight is over our food because now they're doing that to the Amos millers and the Amish farm and stuff. No, you can't have raw milk, you can't have your own cows, and you can't give that to people. We're going to come in. You've got a voluntary market here. Nobody's sick. We're not saying anything has happened to anybody, but we're
not going to allow that. And so this is going to be because we've allowed them to do this in these other areas and to set these precedents. Now they're doing the same thing. They're going to do the same thing to farms and for our food supply. It never ends. If you let these people establish these precedents, they never stop.
Absolutely, it's extremely important to challenge the fundamental underlying principle and say no, we're not going to comply with that period hardstop.
That's it.
There's no quibbling about whose plan is better. There should be no plan.
There should be no That's the other thing. Everybody's like, well, where's the economic plan from Trump and La La, And it's like either one of them are going to say, I don't do centrally planned economies. I'm an American, They're.
It sounds chaotic.
I was listening to Jordan Peterson talk about this a couple of days ago, and I think part of the lure of leftism and also the same thing on the right, frankly, is that some people fear what they perceive to be the chaos of decentralization. You know, they like the idea of this rigid centralized control apparatus, which they and I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt that they're not necessarily evil, that they think that that's just the better
way to do things, but it really isn't. Decentralization works better because you've got all of these individuals making their own individual choices, and that is a way to sort of flesh out which choices actually are the better ones,
because they succeed, whereas the bad ones fail. You know, failure becomes evident at a smaller scale, further down the pyramid, and so collectively you end up with something much better, which was why America was such a successful and prosperous country for so long, and particularly for working class people. You could be a working class guy and you could afford a single family home, maybe not a McMansion, but
you could afford your own single family home. Your wife didn't have to work, she could stay home to raise your kids. You could afford two new cars every three years. Yeah, I mean, it's astounding to think that we had that once in this country, and bit by bit and piece by piece, it's just been taken away from us.
You had a home, you had a new car, thatch your pointed everge three years. You take a family vacation. You can do it with one family income while you know, the mother actually was a mother and took care of the kids and that type of stuff. Now we've got both parents working and they got to farm the kids out now to have the government do day care for them, and so that has to be a right. It's amazing how we get trapped into this. As one of the things that really concerns me about the Maga cult, the
fact that they are looking for a savior. This used to always be the hallmark of the Democrats, used to be one of the distinguishing features between the Democrats and Republicans. They're looking for everything to be solved by government, and especially by Washington. Used to be, well, don't make a federal case out of it. Well, now everything is a federal case. And now the Conservatives want to make everything a federal case. Whatever is important to them, they want
it solved in Washington, just like the liberals do. And you can hear everybody saying stuff like, well there ought to be a law about against that and everything. It's like no. But what you never hear anybody say is what's a free country, isn't it?
Because we all understand that it no longer is. I think that's very revelatory.
Yeah.
Trump the other day said something, he tweeted out something about how if he's elected, he's going to slash the cost of car insurance by executive fiat or by opposing price controls, and all the red hats shared and clapped like seals, and I said, so, now we're clapping for price controls to the federal government as opposed to simply getting the government out of this thing and saying, okay, look, if a person wants to buy insurance, they have the
right to choose to buy insurance. And that's the most effective way to deal with the cost of insurance, because if you can't make me buy what you're selling, then you can't force me to pay an exordinate price. It's such a simple thing, and people have lost sight of that fundamental elemental truth.
Yeah, that's absolutely right. Well, let's talk a little bit about the good old day. I like this when you do this at ep autos airpeters autos dot com. Some things that you can't do in a new car.
We begin you want to pick Yeah, sure.
Well, I like the way you introduced. That's just like you can't board a commercial airplane anymore, but at first being subjected to some sort of obedience training that you used to have to break a law and get arrested before this kind of stuff happened to you.
And by the way, the reason I put that in there and I italicized it to emphasize it, and then later on in the article I explained why I did that. And I think it's a really important thing because it's such a revelatory thing about the truth about what's going on. If you fly privately, you don't have to go through obedience training. Yeah, so it's only for the human cattle, the bipedal cattle to go to the airport to fly commercially.
They're subjected to this. Insensibly, they're told, well, you got to do this because that's how we prevent the terrorists from getting an airplane and crashing it into a building. Yet somehow these same terriffs are too poor to charter an airplane if they wanted to know. It's just again, it's just a way to give the lie to what they're telling us, just the same as they tell us that it's imperative that everybody drive an electric car because
there's this existential threat of climate change. And yet we're not allowed to have the sub ten thousand dollars evs that are really available all over the rest of the world, which actually would be good for first time people, older people who just need a basic little A to B kind of a car.
Why can't they have that? Oh yeah, instead really can have.
Our forty thousand dollars high performance electric cars. Well, if there's an existential threat, it isn't a high performance and all of that kind of superfluous. It just again it shows the disingenuousness and the maliciousness behind these people. Oh yeah, now to back, I'm sorry I drifted about.
Well, no, I mean I've talked about My audience has heard it many times. I've probably never told you Eric. You know, we came across there was a lawsuit when they rolled out these body scanners and did the pat downs and body scanning, and so there was a pushback in Texas at the time, and a state representative there got it unanimously passed in Texas that they weren't going
to allow that kind of stuff to happen. And so then they came back and said, well, if you don't allow that, we're going to make Texas a no fly zone. And so the lieutenant governor who was head of the Senate, he was a former CIA guy who they set up in the oil business and became a multimillionaire, and he bought his office. He paid more for his office than anybody had ever paid to get elected the state office in Texas. He stopped it in the Senate. They went
through that exercise twice. Well, while all that was going on. There was a lawsuit that came a couple of years later from an engineer who came after them, and during discovery he got them to show some documents. Now, when they posted this up on the government website where they show the lawsuits, pacer dot gov, they accidentally put up for a couple of hours the unredacted lawsuit. And then they caught their mistake and they put up the redacted lawsuit so we could see what they didn't want us
to see. And what they didn't want us to see was at the same time all this fight was going on in Texas. They said, the TSA said in their internal documents, there is no threat to airports or airplane They know it, We know it. They know it. We all play along with this game. It's like George orwell time you see Yeah.
I mean, the only outside of this once you realize it, is that the scales fall from your eyes and you understand what you're dealing with, and that if anything is positive about what's occurred over the last five years, in particular, it's that I think that the naive trust that a lot of people have had in the institutions has been shaken profoundly, and these people no longer just implicitly trust what they're told, and that's healthy and we may actually
manage to pull ourselves out of that if enough people begin to take that point of view.
Yeah. Actually, early on the show, when I talked about what's happening north North Carolina and in Tennessee, there was a North Carolina legislator realtor who said, this is what's happening, folks, and there's a lot of looting that's happening. And share officer told me that you need to have your gun and keep the safety off because he says really dangerous. And she said, yeah, people are getting desperate. But she was talking about how people needed help, and she said,
you can't trust any of these institutions. You certainly can't trust the government to help you, and you can't trust most of these charitable institutions. So find somebody who's actually going to distribute this locally, you know, find churches or other things like that, and give them your money, because nobody trusts the institutions anymore, and for a very good reason. But the good part of it is that many people have awakened to this, and so there is some hope
in all of that. But let's talk about some of the things that you can't do in a car. And you mentioned not being able to spend the tires.
Yeah, because all cars now have track control and you can't lock up the tires anymore either because of ABS. And paradoxically interestingly to me, because it's about it's kind of a demonstration cas point of the law of unintended consequences. ABS has been with us now for what thirty something forty years even, and tailgating is now worse than ever.
And I think that there is a.
Direct relationship between the ubiquity of anti lock breaks and tailgating because people now feel confident that they can tailgate because oh, I've got ABS, so I'm not going to lose control of my car. It's not going to go into a skid and run right into the car ahead
of me. So you know, in the past, when a car didn't have ABS, and you and I learned to drive on cars that didn't have ABS, it was out of pure self interest, intelligent to maintain an adequate following distance between your car and the vehicle ahead of you, because you knew if you didn't, you were not going
to be able to stop the car in time. Probably now people have this point of view that, well, the car is going to keep me safe, and so in fact, fatalities are going up, ironically, even though we have all of this safety technology that's being embedded in all the vehicles, that's right.
Yeah, people see that and then they say, well, you know, I can slack off in this. Yeah. I grew up spending the tires. I was a sixteen year old with a couple of buddies in high school and they used to egg me on to spend the tires and Mustang all the time.
Another about it too, If you grow up with those kinds of vehicles, you really do learn about vehicle dynamics and how to control a car. Yeah, Whereas now they're so anesthetized, these new cars. You know, they're deceptive in a way because they feel so very controllable, and they are. But the problem with that is that they tend to encourage people who don't have the skills to push the
limit in the car. So now they're driving it considerably faster and maybe more aggressively in a corner when they don't really have the skills to deal with it. If they get to the point in the car where the safety systems are not going to be a sufficient safety net to get them out of trouble if it happens.
That's right. Yeah, Yeah, I went to limit and beyond many times.
Yeh, sure me too.
I had my guardian, Angel was working overtime. I'm sure he's going to have to sit down and talk to me about that at some point in time. But I had a lot of experiences with my buddies in high school. We did all kinds of crazy stuff. And you can't do jay turns anymore. You can't do Rockfords, right.
That's all back now that you can watch on retro TV.
But there's some of the prosaic things that you can't do anymore that I feel like we've been kind of jypped in a way from you know, in the past.
To give you an.
Example, because you know, I'm a Firebird guy and I've been into these cars for a long time.
I have a trans am.
But let's say that I hadn't been able to afford to get a transam and I just got the base Firebird. Well, I could always go to a junk yard and I could get the neat formula steering wheel from a junk transam, and I could get the upgraded seats from that car if I wanted to, and I could just literally physically unbolt them from one car and bolt them into the other car.
You can't do that anymore.
These cars are now an integrated package of components that are all tied into to one another. So basically, whatever you bought when you bought the car, that's it. There's very little that you can do at all in terms of altering the car once you've bought it.
Yeah, well that's true. Yeah, although I did you know, that's one of the nice things I like about Amiata. There's a big aftermarket for it apart and everything, maybe more so than anything else. And so, you know, all these things you're talking about. Steering wheel made me think I swapped out my steering wheel. I had to get rid of the of the airbag. But there are places that you can find out how to do that.
It can be done.
Harder exactly.
Now.
I think pretty much every new car now has earbags embedded in the seat. And now, of course, because of that, the seat is now part of the safety system and it's all wired in and plugged in and if you meddle with any of that, you're going to end up causing yourself all kinds of problems. It's just not worth even trying to do it.
Oh yeah, yeah, I agree. Yeah. In my particular case, it was because I wanted to go to I want to go to a smaller diameter wheel because I just like that better. You know, I thought the other one was a bit big, so I want a smaller diameter wheel. But yeah, you can. It is increasingly more difficult. As a matter of fact. You go back and you look at the people who would put in big engines into me on it, which I was never really interested in because it's just not the character of the car, right.
But they got companies out in Colorado called Flying Miata and they would cram in Corvette engines and the small Miadas anything. Those things are crazy. But then you know that creates all all the kinds of problems because now you got to put in a transmission that doesn't shift as nicely as the Miada thing did and stuff. But they did that with first and second generation. They were even able to do it with a little bit more difficulty in the third generation. But when they got to
the fourth generation. It was so computerized it took them a very long time to get it, and they still had a lot of bugs in it, and they had to hire people who were computer experts to get around all of the computerized stuff. So it is getting impossible to modify the cars, truly is Yeah.
And getting back to the thing we were talking about earlier with regard to insurance costs, a friend of mine who lives down the road for me has a late model sub up and she dinged the driver's side door and you look at it and think, well, no big deal, you know, just pull out that dent and you know, and touch it up and good to go. Turns out she got a couple of estimates from various body shops
and they wanted on the low end twenty two hundred dollars. Yeah, And the reason why is because they don't bother with trying to fix the doors anymore. They just replace them. And you have to replace everything because of the body control units, modules and all of the electronics and everything.
So again we pay for this. You know, what used to be a.
Minor impact at a minor repair cost and a fender bender kind of a situation. Now can intail thousands of dollars of damages to the vehicle, and you know the insurance mafia knows that, and so they're not going to pay it. You are, I am. Everybody else is going to pay for it?
Oh yeah, absolutely. You've got an article up at ep Autosoreric Peters autos dot com. Clarkson is right talking about Jeremy Clarkson. Tell us funny you right about it. And of course I hate to see the fact that you know, they don't do top gear anymore. I guess it's completely dead now. They got into so much trouble with the BBC, then finally they picked up my Amazon. But you know, nobody wants to do anything about cars, saying work. So he's got Clarkson's farm and now he's opened up a
pob and everything. But what did he do, right?
Yeah, Well, Clarkson was one of the last of the car guy journalists. You know, he was of a piece with Brockades that, you know, a guy that I admired when I was a kid and kind of got me along the on the road to becoming a car journalist myself. And they actually had some interest in cars other than appliances and were interested in things besides how safe and
compliant they were with whatever their latest regulations are. And he's become kind of cynical, which is understandable because his career goes back thirty something years and he can remember what we like to call it before times, you know, when cars were actually.
Interesting in fun.
And he said, and I hope it's okay to use a little profanity in this context. He said, new cars are sah, you know what. And the reason that he said that, I kind of I took that and ran with it a little bit. And I think what he meant was they become so homogeneous, ironically in part because they used to be sh whatever. They had personality, They had quirks, you know, sometimes you had to kick it, or you had to do some special thing to get it to work right, or it had to be it
had personality, you know. Now they are literally appliances and toasters. And now I understand that from the standpoint of you want something reliable that gets you from A to B without trouble and hassle. And that's important. But the emotional attachment that we've had to our cars is being severed, and people no longer care about cars.
They view them.
As just these disposable things like a toaster, and that's insidious because they are using that to disconnect people from personal mobility.
Why bother who needs one of these things. It's just a hassle, it's just a big expense.
I'll use my app and I'll call up an uber, you know, or I'll get my automated electric car to come pick me up. And they don't understand that by doing that, what they are doing is giving total control over their ability to go anywhere they want to go, on their own time, their own schedule, whenever they feel like it. They're giving that up to these centralized control structures.
Oh yeah, oh absolutely. Yeah. As Ron Atkinson, another comedian, Mister Bean said, you don't so much drive these new cars as you manage them. And you know, he's got really expensive cars because he's very, very wealthy. But yeah, the car has become very anodyne. As you're talking about that, I'm thinking about the spitfire that I had and how you know, top Gear used to be about doing car reviews and things like that, and they would do a lot of hyper cars and stuff, and it's like, okay,
that's kind of interesting. But not really. That's why I like about the cars that you do. You actually do reviews of real cars, but you know, they would have some hyper car stuff and anything. But then when they started doing the Amazon series, it was all about adventure, right.
They would try to take the cars into some area where they didn't really have roads or bridges or this kind They've got to navigate through this jungle or through the Arctic or whatever, and it became kind of an adventure, right, and the car was there. They get old cars that modify them, and it was an adventure. And it made me think, as I'm looking at your article here, made me think about my life with my time Spitfire, which was not anodyne at all. It was every trip was
an adventure. You didn't know if you're going to complete it or not.
We all have.
Stories, don't we now. I mentioned some of some of them in the article. One of my fondest memories is of my seventy four Beetle, which I used to commute into DC with when I first started working in DC at the Washington Times, before I started getting new cars to test drive, and every drive was an adventure, particularly
in the winter time. I used to keep an old Exxon gas card in the glove box because when it was cold out, you'd get frost on the windshield, and so I'd use the car to scrape a little hole so I could cut portals so.
I could see.
And then in the summertime, when it got hot, you know, the humidity would result in essentially the same thing, except it was still moist, not frozen.
So I had a rag that I would use, you know, to do that.
And it's looking back on that, it's fun and it makes me smile, and you're smiling. And we have these these sories of these cars that we remember affectionately, you know, from thirty years ago. Oh yeah, who remembers whatever appliance they drove five years but nobody cares.
Yeah, oh exactly, Yeah, you know again, it was it was one of these things, you know. It was both a love and hate relationship that I had with a spitfire. It's like, I imagine if you had, you know, a girlfriend that you're like, but she's constantly creating problems. I never had that problem Karen's doing the board. Never had a girlfriend like that, but I didn't have a car like that, And you know, so he loved it and
you hated it. It was a raw experiences in Florida, and so you know, it's hot and humid, and then it would rain in the afternoons, and when it rain you just had the single thickness of a roof there. So it was like you were in a tent and it's leaking in through the windows and all the rest of the stuff, and you're driving down the road and everything is shaking. But it was a blast, you know, it really was a blast, and so it's also empowering.
Yeah, it was empowering.
And wait, this is something I think that it's important to convey to young people who don't have any direct.
Experience with this.
Yeah, it broke down, but you know what, you could usually fix it with these these modern computer controlled devices, essentially cell phones. They're fine until they stop working. And once they stop working, that's it. You know, you just you helplessly stand there by the side of the road waiting for the tow truck. That's kind of a masculating, you know, in a very real way. It was great to be able to deal with the problem by the
side of the road. You know, you had to band aid it with whatever literally duct tape, dealing wire or whatever. But you got the thing back on the road, and that made you feel really good, particularly when you're young. You're like, wow, I can you know, I can deal with this. I can handle a problem myself, as opposed to having to pick up the phone and call somebody who can help me.
Yeah, oh yeah yeah. And with that car, you know, the spidfire, the whole front half of the car was one piece, so you'd lift up the front which was both fenders as well as the hood and everything, and you can step inside the chassis and work on the engine, you know, I mean, it's just right there. It's this little tiny engine, and there was plenty of room to stand inside the engine bay with the engine.
That reminds me another thing I talked about in that article about what you can't do anymore, see the engine.
Yeah, because you know, the manufacturers.
Are almost all of you know, they put these black plastic they call them acoustic or sound deadening covers on top of the engine, which has the effect of making all the engines look exactly the same. There was a time when new car dealers would proudly pop the hoods of their new vehicles, and that way people who are interested in park could go in Marvel and you know what was under the hood.
Look at that. Wow, that's neat.
I love to pop the hood of old cars like my trans am, because it's just neat to look at the engine. You know, they made it interesting to look at it. Now they all look the same, and whether it's delivered or not, I feel as though it serves the purpose of fading any distinction that's meaningful between cars with engines and electric cars. Pop the hood versus piece of black plastic. Who cares it all looks the same?
You don't see anything. I've got a couple of comments here. One of them is from Seth Landergan. Thank you for the tip, Seth appreciate it, says Eric Peter is one of my favorite night show guests. Great job as always, David, Yeah, one of my favorite guests as well. We've been talking for many years. I love talking to Eric. And this is also from Jason Barker. The one time I trusted abs and kept my foot on the brakes, I said,
halfway down the road with zero control. Cole Amas says, air bags in the seat like a Russian videos and launch their friends fifty feet in the air. Yeah, that's right.
I've seen that video, and that brings us another point, if I might want a quick little rant about how the cost benefit and risk reward equation has been taken away from us.
You know, people will.
Say, but airbags save lives. That's true, but they can also hurt and you can kill you, and you don't have the choice. And it doesn't matter whether somebody else as well. It's more likely that it will help you rather than hurt you. So what, it's not their business, it's not their right to take that choice away from you. You have the right as an empowered adult to make those decisions for yourself. But they want to treat us as if we were idiot children in perpetuity. At least
in the normal sense. The goal is to raise their children to become empowered adults, whereas with these people in government who want to parent us, the goal is to keep us in a state of childlike idiocy forever.
That's right. They treat adults like children, and they treat children like adults now in the schools. But you know, you talk about airbags. When they first came out, Remember they had set these things up and tweaked them for a typical men, right, And it was injuring women and killing children then. And remember the fight about can't I just have the ability to turn this thing off? No, you can't turn it off. Not gonna let you try. That was the most amazing thing to me.
Now and we've had this, we've had this admitted. The government acknowledges the massive tobacca with the Takata airbags, which affects.
Millions of vehicles.
They will not even allow people who had the misfortunate to buy one of these things and have that thing steering at them in the face to temporarily have the thing turned off until the dealers can clear the backlog of people who are waiting to get the replacement airbags. They just it tells you again what they really care about isn't your safety, It's about their authority and their control.
Yes, that's absolutely right. And I talked about that early in the program. A helicopter pile trying to go in and help people, and when he landed, he had this little Barney Fife come up to him. You gotta get arrested if you go and do this again. You've got to get out of here, and all my authority, he doesn't care about the people who can't get out. There's no government helicopters taking them out. He's just going to shut it down. You and I talked about the Dakata
airbags many, many times. We talked about it in the context of this nonsense about the Volkswagen emissions problems and all the rest of this stuff, and said, look, you know, they've killed sixteen people worldwide, and they have these recalls of these things. If these things go off, it's like getting shot in the chest with them with a shotgun or something like that. And yet they're not doing the same thing to Takata that they did to Volkswagen, because
with Volkswagen that was part of their agenda. They had to shut every thing down for their agenda, for their green agenda that they're running through. Just amazing.
Ye, the contrasts between Volkswagens very high mileage, very high efficiency diesel powered cars and the electric cars was something that could not be abided. You know, you could as recently as twenty but twenty fifteen, I think when they're still available, you could buy a brand new Jetta mid sized sedan with a diesel engine that got fifty miles per gallon twenty two thousand dollars. It kind of makes a forty thousand dollars test.
That looks silly.
Yes, absolutely, By the way, Jason Barker, thank you for this. And to remind everybody, so everybody's on Twitter, please go find Eric and leave a comment on one of his posts. He's being shadow banned there and we can break that if we interact with his posts. And again, Jason, nice Twitter handle is libertarian car g as Yes, sound.
Like a mobster And that's not intentional, it's just they wouldn't they wouldn't let me have the additional characters to say libertarian car.
Let's talk about a friend who has passed Mike Valentine, the Valentine radar detectors. And again, this is something that we're going to look back already probably on as we got the insurance companies and the car companies are snitching on you, telling the insurance companies he's driving too fast on it's just amounter of time before they start sending
that into the police and everything. But you know, for the time being, the old smoking in the bandit gang where you've got radar and radar detectors, and this going back and forth. He was a real pioneer and that the Valentine radar detectors, And of course they're a sponsor on your website to see them all the time. So if somebody's going to get one of these excellent radar detectors, flick through at Eric petersautos dot com. That'll that'll help Eric.
And it's a you know, but it's it's a great radarchitector tell us a little bit about your perspective.
Yeah, Mike, you know, I know Mike personally. I first interviewed Mike back in the nineties when I was working to Washington Times. Really good guy and for those who are not aware of Mike, he was the guy who developed one of the first really effective multi ban radarchitectors that detected all of the various bands of the police radar.
And more than just that, he was very, very directly and enthusiastically involved against the fight to repeal the federal fifty five mile an hour speed limit, which people who were in their twenties today won't remember. This was something that lasted for almost twenty years that I think was imposed in nineteen seventy four and lasted through about ninety four.
If I'm remembering my numbers correctly.
And let me let me say it would have been to his advantage to cheer that on, because I would have helped the sales, right, you'd think, yeah.
But no, you know he was again, he was just a good guy, a regular American guy who thought it was outrageous that the federal government would just arbitrarily declare literally, just like that, the highway speeds that had been perfectly legal and presumably safe, you know, safe to drive seventy miles an hour in nineteen seventy three, and all of a sudden, it is illegal speeding, you know, the day after this thing gets gets changed, And you know, he
probably saved millions of Americans, many millions of dollars. I know he saved me many thousands of dollars in extortionate fines, particularly when I was a young guy because the ms NMSL, the National Maximum Speeding that was still enforced when I was in college. So I was doing a lot of driving back then. And if I hadn't had a radar sector, my driving rap sheet would have been longer than a phone book.
And he had the best one. I mean, he had greatomic. I think it was angled over to the Yeah, he just came out with the second generation a couple of years ago. I think I've still got the first generation. I actually there's anybody who's got a Valentine detector. There is a great app that's for free. It's a guy from Raleigh, I think because in his examples all the
maps and everything are there in Raleigh. But it's an app called JB v one as a Valentine one, but it's JB is in John Boy and he just does an amazing job combining the functions of your phone in terms of GPS location, other things like that, and giving you control to mute it or to you know, added a whole bunch of features to the old Valentine radar detectors that then got added in in the second generation. But it's just a great app and it's out there
for free. This guy does it again because just a kind of a passion. You know, it was a business for Mike Valentine, but as you point out, he had a passion to help people not get ticketed. Yeah, it is a shame to see that that passing away, and it's a shame to see the ability of us to play smoking in the bandmit going away too.
I know, well, I think about the V one detector too that people should know about. There is now a lot of what you might call electronic clutter on the road because almost all new cars are actively emitting signals because they have they have their own laser and radar systems built in as part of the safety technology. So it can be pointless to run one of the other detectors because they're constantly going off because they're picking up these signals.
And you know, after a while, you.
Can't deal with the thing beeping at you and flashing lights all the time. The Ladies generation V one from Valentine has filtered out that stuff, so now when you get in the work, it is a police radar. It's not some other car coming at you that has some driver's safety technology that's causing the thing to trigger.
Yeah, and that's really the key thing now, And that's one of the things I like when I use the app, the JB one. When I've got I've got a convertible, So where do I put my radar detector? Right? It's like a big red flag. It's not illegal like it is in Virginia where you live, but you know, it's a big red flag for cops if they see it there. So I do is I mounted it onto. I stick
it onto a turbulence deflector that's behind me. And I've got a section cup mount on it and my son three D printed a black box so nobody can see the display and everything gets sent to my phone, which you know a lot of people have a phone mounted so that they can get navigation. It's got map on it and all that kind of stuff. But it also does that it does a good job of remembering certain
signals and muting those out. And that's really where the uh, the rubber meets the road today and radar detectors is getting rid of false signals and you know, things that belong to hondas and things like they're really bad about that. Uh. But and also locations that you're going to drive by, whether it's some kind of a burglar alarm, so it remembers all that stuff and it shuts it down and uh and that really is now being incorporated into the
second generation of the radar detectors. It was always interesting to me. It was like this, you know, measures and countermeasures and counter countermeasures.
There was always a fi versus spider.
Remember that it's exactly what it was. But that's kind of the world that we live in now, and it's now everything is becoming like that, you know, whether it's.
Well, it's particularly important. You know, it was always a malting and ohways an annoyance, but now it has gotten to be outright extortionate. You know, you get a simple speeding ticket, and in many states it's one hundred several hundred dollars fine, just a trivial speeding ticket. But that's
not the worst of it. The worst of it will come a few months later when you get your adjustment the insurance and they'll continue to adjust you for the next three years at least until that ticket finally drops off of your record. So you know, people look at the cost of the rear detector. My god, it's five hundred bucks. I can't afford to spend five hundred bucks, Yes, as you can. Yeah, compare that to the cost of even one ticket.
That's right, I bet in the same category two as you know, having a camera there so you can tell that you're not at fault in the accident. That type of thing. Always great talking to you, Eric Peters, Eric petersautos dot com. Very interesting articles about real cars, about liberty, and about mobility. Thank you so much, Eric, and thank you all of you for joining us today.
Good thank you, David. I appreciate it.
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