Joining us now is Eric Peter's always loved talking to Eric. We share a love of cars and a love of liberty, and that covers a wide range topics. Eric peters dot com is where you'll find a lot of very interesting articles about cars. And I'm interested, very interested in a couple of things that you've got here, the anodyne exotic. I want to get into that. But before I do,
what does breaking on your mind? Because I picked up some of the articles, it's been I guess three or four weeks since we've talked, and so there's a wealth of things that have happened in the automotive industry. But what is at the forefront of your mind right now? Thanks for joining us.
I've been ruminating. I've been ruminating lately a lot about making do with again the things that we used to make do with. You know, if you're a Gen X person or older, you'll remember a time when it was feasible for even a high school kid to buy a car using their own money than having their parents buy a car for them. Because there was a time when you could still buy basic new cars, which made them affordable.
You could buy a car with or without things like air conditioning, power windows, locks, automatic transmissions, and I'm by no means disparaging any of that. Those things are all very nice, particularly once you get a little older and you like the idea of having an air conditioning system
that you can turn on to keep you cool. But hey, when you're seventeen or eighteen, it's kind of nice to be able to go out and buy seven hundred dollars a lobby that lets you get from A to B, you know, And it's one of the reasons why, you know, when we were at that age, we became functional adults a lot sooner than the kids today. Because cars, they've been priced out of cars largely, and part of the reason for that, it's what I like to call this
riptide effect of being comfortable with extravagant debt. You know, people now think nothing of signing up for a fift or sixty thousand dollars in denture. That's, you know, for a car for the next six years you're going to be paying five six hundred dollars a month for it. Because they all have these things that are now standard that used to be considered luxurious. There used to be a thing We'll remember you and I can remember called an economy car. Remember economy cars?
Oh yeah, oh yeah, Shell it was at car was a Pento you want to talk about. An economy car had rubber mats, It didn't have air conditioning, it didn't have power windows.
It was it was pretty bare bound. I tell you what. We were living in Florida.
If you don't have air conditioning in Florida, you're thinking about it all the time.
Sure.
Now, to be clear, I am in no way disparaging the comforts and amenities that new cars have. My point is that now that they all have that, they become extravagantly expensive and there's no downward price pressure. Back in the day, when you had the option to pick say a luxury car or luxury features, which was what they were considered once, like air conditioning, in power windows and automatic transmission, it kept prices in check because you always
have that option. If you wanted to buy the higher and more expensive car, you could, but you know, on ether side of the lot there was a more inexpensive car. I remember, just after we got out of car college, one of my best friends, he just lives down the road for me. He wanted to start a roofing business. And so he bought a brand new eighty nine Ford F one fifty pick up. Now it just had a straight six engine, manual transmission, manual, four wheel drive, and
that was it. No air conditioning, no power windows, nothing, And he could afford to do that, you know, as a kid just out of college to start his business. Today, the least expensive aft Sun truck that you can buy is pushing forty thousand dollars.
Yeah, yeah, I.
Mean how many how many kids just out of college can afford something like that?
Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah, it used to be.
You know again, it was a real unusual thing to have power windows. My dad would get catallcts. He would usually wait until they were like two or three years old, so that all the appreciation was gone, but he had he would have power windows, and it's like, wow, look this has got electric windows.
All the rest of the cars.
I guess that I had for about ten years worth of cars before I ever had one that had power windows on it. They were all crank and it was not really a problem with the spitfire. Like we got behind me right here, the spitfire. While I was sitting there in the driver's seat, I could reach your car with so small I can reach across and I could roll the passenger window up and down with it while I was driving manually, I could roll it up and down.
Well, I think we're reaching a kind of event horizon now. You know, this was sustainable as long as debt was viable. But I think we're getting to the point now where people can't continue to assume the levels of debt necessary to maintain this Potempkin Village facade of affluence and prosperity.
It's just ridiculous self. Evidently. You know, what's the average family income in this country, something like sixty thousand bucks something like that, and the average price paid for a new vehicle as of last year approached fifty thousand dollars.
It's ludicrous. You know, you can't keep doing that. So I don't know that it's necessarily such a bad thing in a way that perhaps Americans who have gotten used to living beyond their means are kind of nudged in a way to go back to living within their means. It's not necessarily a bad life lesson. You know, the more you live within your means, the less you're at
the mercy of these corporations. And of the government. You know, back during the pandemic, one of the great things that I had going for me was that I'm not only self employed, but I don't have debt. So I didn't have a corporate orval or telling me that I had to mask up, you know, and threatening me with with loss of employment if I didn't roll up my sleeve to get jab. You know, I had the financial wherewithal if I had to to ride it out, you know.
And that's a really really comforting thing, you know, to know that you don't have to put up with really abusive kinds of situations at work, because in the back of your mind, you're thinking, well, if I don't, if I don't bow my knee, bend my need to this, I'm going to not be able to take care of my family. I'm not going to be able to pay my mortgage. I'm not going to be able to put food on the table. It's an enormous pressure that's been
applied and people, it's very subtle. People have fought into this now. You know, for at least the less generation or two it's been, it's been more realized to live paycheck to paycheck, to have no savings and thus to be completely at the mercy of these big corporations and the government too.
Yeah.
Yeah, yesterday I interviewed a couple of doctors, a married couple, and they were both mds, physicians and New Zealand. They did clinical trials and stuff like that. But he had gotten out even before the COVID stuff, and I said, so, you know, when the interview was over, I talked to him. I said, so, what are you doing now. You know, both of you were doctors and you've had to get out of your position because of your principles and because you were fighting this stuff on the basis of real
science and things like that. And they said, well, you know, we've got some farmland and we're homeschooling our kids and we're raising food and we're self sufficient, just like you know what you're talking about. They said, we've never been happier because we don't have to work for a corporation and we're not and they're not working in New Zealand. They would be working for the government as part as being a doctor and that type of thing. But they're
now independent and self sufficient and they've got neighbors. I mean, they're living the life that we all aspire to, I think, and it's worked out for them. That really needs you know, we need to have our goals and our aspirations, I
think adjusted. In this country. They've been telling us for the longest time that both husband and wife need to be working for the man and we've got to have these careers and that's the only way that we're going to have any real self respect or respect from other people. And that simply isn't true. But they put that onus on us that oh, you need to have a job and you need to have a title or you're nothing,
and that really isn't true. You know, we need to completely rethink these lies that they're telling us about how we evaluate ourselves, how we evaluate our life, what our goal in life is. That is what really needs to be rethought. We need to start with the reformation with ourselves, and that's a big part of it.
I think.
I think so too, And I think it's politically poisonous,
particularly with regard to the younger crowd. You know, the general that's coming up now that's in their twenties, that feels to spare hopelessness and anger when they look at the stats that you know, at an average house now costs the average price for a house is four hundred thousand dollars now, and they can't afford a car, they can't afford a house, and they feel like they're going to be living in their parents' house until they're forty,
you know, if they ever get out of their parents' house, and that is fertile ground for this Marxism that's been percolating upward everywhere where. They promise people, oh, just like Lenin did land food, you know, will take care of you. Don't worry the oppressors, when in fact they be. The whole reason for the problem has to do with exactly the machinations of these machinators, and the people who are responsible for it, you know, are the ones who are
offering the solution. It's it's just it's absolutely tragic because these kids, they don't know. You and I grew up in a different world. You know, people who are who are under forty don't really know the world that existed before them, and you know, I don't know. It's our job to somehow try to convey the reality of what was to them so that they can see what be in the future.
That's right, yeah, I think a lot of them are seeing that. You know, the university situation is a potempcon village for the most part. You know, it can help you to get a job, but you know you're still going to be in that corporate world of control. I think a lot of them saw how that control worked out four years ago, and I don't necessarily want to put themselves in that trap, into a debt trap in order to get that degree and a lot of other things like that. So yeah, I think it you really
do need to adjust what you aspire to. What you think is, you know how whether or not you care about what other people think, or whether you're going to pursue your own goals. I think that's really the key thing.
Absolutely, yeah, absolutely.
You know you've got an interesting article. I said, this is the first one I wanted to talk to you about the Anodyne Exotic. And I tell you as somebody who owns a little tiny car that doesn't have a whole lot of horsepower, but I'd love to drive it. That really hit home the Anodyne Exotic. You know years ago Ron Atkinson, who's mister Bean and he's very successful. Of course, I got a lot of money as a movie start, he talked about how he's got hypercars and everything,
a million dollar cars. They say, you don't really so much drive them as you manage them. I thought that's a pretty good description of these things. And I think that's really what you're talking about with the anodyne exotic.
I mean, what good is it to continue? And this what the other public cas just want to appreciate about what you do at your website, Eric Peters autos dot com, is that all the other sites, what they do is they compare all these meaningless statistics about zero to sixty and all of the other metrics that they've come up with in the past few years, skid pad numbers or whatever, and it's really is meaningless to the experience, and you focus more on the real experience of it as well
as the things that they're putting in the cars that are going to make them unaffordable and are going to basically spy on us. And so I think when we talk about the anodyne exotic, that really does fall into that category that you know, there's a lot of stuff that they've loaded this up with. It is really unnecessary, and you take it back to the real experience.
Yeah, well, cars have become quite one dimension. A good way to understand this is if you're a fan of stock car racing. All of the cars have to fit within a template, a literal template. They have a template that they fix over the body of the vehicle so that it conforms to whatever the standards are. And a similar thing is applied to new vehicle design and regard to the government regulation. So you get these vehicles that all look pretty much the same. So there isn't a
lot of personality. There's not a lot of difference in terms of anything meaningful emotionally, the intangible stuff, you know, it makes a car interesting, Like you can think about the fins of a late fifties Cadillac or Chrysler. You know, just the look of that that was just wow, look at that. Somebody came up with that. That's just incredible. So you focus on the one thing that they're still allows some latitude with, and that's horse power and how
quickly the thing can get to sixty. The problem with that is that, you know, once you get beyond that, it's very ephemeral. You know, this this car that I focused on in the article is the one thousand something horsepower version of the Corvette that's going to be coming out next year, and okay, great, So for a few months, it's going to be I guess, short of a Bugatti,
the most powerful new high performance car that you can get. Well, you know, somebody else is going to make one with twelve hundred horsepower car and then they'll be fifteen hundred. And once that happens, it's kind of like owning a six month old iPod or iPad. You know, it's like, oh wow, when you get it, it's the latest, coolest thing, But after a couple of months, it's just not anymore.
It's old. And then because it doesn't have anything else about it that's particularly appealing that connects with you on an emotional level, it's just a throwaway and it's sad.
You know.
All you have to do is go look and I put some pictures with the article and look at earlier quarvets, and they're just you don't even have to drive the thing. You don't even have to be physically in its presence. Just look at the picture of the thing.
Oh I know, yeah, when I was a kid looking at those things, I didn't really care about the zero to sixty and from sixty to zero numbers, you know, with the with the Corvette, I just looked at It's like, wow, that is just amazing. And you know, the sting Ray Corvette was my favorite one, and it was a small car, you know, but both as a convertible and also as a fastback they were just amazing to look at.
Yeah, absolutely corgeous. You know, there's an analogy here that occurs to me too. I'm an aviation fan, and if you look at older airplanes, there was a lot of difference between one airplane and another. Military aviation, in particular fighter jets. Now they all look the same. They all have that same insect look. And the reason they had that insect look is because it is dictated by the function. You know, they're trying to maximize the performance of the
aircraft within a certain envelope. And the same is true with regard to these exotics. It's why the new Corvette looks like the new Lamborghini, which looks like the new Ferrari, which looks like the new whatever it is, they all have, you know, that same sort of angular, insectoid look. And motorcycles is another one. You know, I have motorcycles. I love motorcycles. Now, you know how you tell the difference between a Honda and a Kawasaki and a Suzuki by
the color of the plastic. You know, Hondas are red, Kawasakis are green, Suzuki's are blue, Yamahas are yellow. But you know, I'm talking about hyperbikes here, sport bikes, which is the analysis of the supercars, because you know, the sole objective is to see how quickly this thing can go through the quarter mile and how fast it can go on the top end. That sort of windows down and dictates what type of shape you're going to have.
So that's why they all look the same. You're respective of the brand.
Well, at least they're doing them in different colors, because most of the cars are either you know, black, white, a shade of gray or red, you know, and it's very rare that you see a car that's different color. I was driving with Karen.
The other day. She said, look at that car. There's the color. It's not a.
Black or white cars and I forgot what it was. It doesn't like it, but it's it's interesting that they have a different color.
But this was inadvertent because you know, I've I've kind of thought about that off and on peripherally for actually a number of years. Why are these cars all pretty much all the same color? You see lots of over white, you know, this is these sort of generic milk box kind of cont of colors. And I got to looking at some of the stats of one of the vehicles that I was reviewing, and I noticed, my god, they charge you extra for most of the other colors, and
not just a little bit either, you know. I think it was a Mini. I was driving a Mini Clubman a few weeks back, and if you wanted anything but one or two colors, you had to pay eight hundred dollars extra for it.
Well, when you look at what they're doing with it.
I saw an article I forget which there's probably several of them that are doing it now, you know, different functions on the cars. I think it was it was Audi or Mercedes. Maybe BMW is a German car, and uh, you know, if you want this function that I would take for granted, uh, you've got to pay an annual subscription rate to it, you know, And they're doing that now. They're they're taking these these different functions of the car and making them a subscription.
It's crazy.
Sure, it's the Netflix model. At least when you pay under Bucks for the different colored paint, you actually own the paint, I guess. But you're right now it's me and W that you're thinking about. They and it was Tesla that started this. Of course, Tesla was the one that came up with this idea of requiring you to subscribe to the features. The features are all built into the car, but they're only activated if you pay the fee. Now, people discovered this because they would sell the car, you know.
So the second owner of the Tesla and he looks at the windowsticker and it says that it comes with whatever the feature is. I think it was in particular their self driving features. So it looks like, Okay, the guy ordered this with the self driving feature. Great, that's what I want. I'll be happy to buy this car. They buy the car and they find out that it doesn't work. And it's not because of the mechanical problem or an electrical problem. It's because they haven't paid their subscription.
So they have to get in touch with Tesla to pay. And BMW is doing the same thing. Now they build the seed heaters into all the cars. You know, all the cars have the physical stuff that makes the seat heater work. But if you want it to actually work, when you push the button, you have to say a monthly fat.
That is the chenziest thing I've ever seen.
I couldn't remember what feature it was, but that's why it's a seat heater of all things. You got to pay them to get the seat heater to work. When Karen and I got married, we didn't have much money, but we had some time, and so we went to England for about two and a half months and we had no time, and so we were, you know, we were starving. We couldn't afford to even eat, you know. But we stayed in this one little beat up place, this many flatlet that was on the outskirts of one
and particular. It's like almost an hour to get in, and they had for the lights, you had to put in a coins, you know, they were like a quarter, you know, And so the heater was like it was like a thousand watt little squirrel cage motor, like something you'd use for a hair dryer. And I mean it was cold, it was January, and then you would for the lights and for the TV and for the heater, you would have to put coins in this thing and
it would give you a certain amount of time. I mean that's and I thought that was the strangest thing. But that's I think the seat heater that you got to get with a subscription is even chet seer and stranger when you consider the price of a BMW.
I mean, it's great.
Can you remember the like if you went to a shady roadside motel back in the day, they would have magic fingers. Oh yeah, same thing, the coin box on the side of the.
Heat that's right. Yeah.
But we were watching a movie and you know, all of a sudden, boom, everything goes down and we're like scrambling around the coins and trying to find the thing to put it in because the lights were gone.
The TV was gone.
Everything just go gets turned off and that and that little flat But.
You know, it's funny, but at the same time, it's also infuriating because what you're doing, step by step is taking away the ownership of a vehicle. You know, when you asked bought it and it is yours if the word has any meaning, You paid for it and now it's your property into a thing that you were allowed to use, you know, within certain parameters, and as long
as you continue to pay for it. And it's a really vicious business model, and I think it actually is neared by our friend Bill Gates back in the nineties when he came up with the idea of instead of you buying the CD that had the whatever, the editing program or whatever you were using, that you possessed. You owned it once you bought it, and maybe it was out of date, but it still worked, and if you
put it on another computer, it would work. And if you wanted to give it to your kid, you know, for school, they could have it and it could work. To licensing software. Oh so now you buy the license for the software and you have to renew it, and if you don't renew it, every so off and then it just stops working. So that the auto industry saw that and decided, oh, that's a great idea. We're going to start doing that too.
Yeah, in the mid two thousands, I remember they started doing it with graphics programs and with three D modelers and everything like that, and all of a sudden they're all doing it as an annual subscription. Of course, it still is that way with Adobe, And it was infuriating, it really was. Talk about this nineteen seventy eight Mustang too. Oh yeah, for thirty two thousand dollars.
I thought that.
I saw that, and I thought, well, I wonder how much my nineteen sixty eight fastback would be if I thought that, because well, I thought the Mustang toos. I didn't really care much for them. But yeah, it's amazing thirty two thousand dollars for that.
Well some background. Not far from me is a really interesting dealer that specializes in classic cars and weird cars, including right hand drive stuff. They call it JDM Japanese Domestic market stuff, and a lot of these cars are are just driver cars, you know, if you want to get a neat old driver, you can get a car like that. And I go there every once in a while to sort of refresh my spirits because sometimes it's so debilitating to deal with every hum that's going on
in the new car world. And I considered a barometer of what's going on in the new car business that they would actually seriously put a thirty two thousand dollars price on a seventy eight Mustang, you know, and for those who don't know what that is. You know, this is the Mustang that was in the day could just could just laughed at by practically everybody. Now, I helped to save the Mustang, to be fair, because things were bad in the mid seventies, so four radically downsized it.
They took a lot of pinto components to make this Mustang too, which was the first Mustang to come with a four cylinder engine and which eventually offered a V eight that wait for it, made all of one hundred and twenty two horse power, And so everybody laughed at it, you know, because at that time it was silly, because you know, the memory of things that were better was still fresher, you know, and you could always buy an older Mustang that was superior, and even the new stuff
got to be progressively better. So the cars got forgotten and they were essentially worthless for many years. Well, their value was creeping up, because my god, they're starting to
look better and better all the time. In the rear of you mirror, you know, you look at this far and it's like, you know, which would I rather have this this extremely low miles pristine seventy eight Mustang two for thirty two thousand dollars, or a new four cylinder turbo Mustang with all kinds of multiplex touch screens and just disconnected drive by wire data mining, spyware, big brother apparatus that I can't work on. And I'm a competent mechanic,
you can't do anything with these vehicles. I could take that little Mustang Ober two, even though its engine only makes about one hundred and horse power, and in a weekend, I could put a four barrel car barrier on it, a set of headers in a cam and I could do that for less than a thousand dollars in double the horse power. That's pretty appealing.
Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely, Yeah, you mentioned the Penta. It's amazing. I didn't know the Mustang too had Pento parts in it, but yeah, that it were.
Four fans I think are pintos. It was the only Mustang to ever have I think it was only Mustang to ever have four lug hubs, just like an economy car.
Wow. Wow, did it blow up if it got hit from the back?
No, I mean, you know it actually was up. You know again, in retrospect, it was. It was more akin to the original sixty four Mustang. You know, the Mustang had gotten big and huge and head in nineteen to seventy three. It was kind of an overwhelming car. The original sixty four Mustang was a light, small, nimble, asual car that appealed to anybody. It wasn't just hot rod types and young guys who liked the original Mustang.
You know.
It was a car that a housewife could drive or an older person could drive. And the Mustang too, that was made from seventy four to seventy eight was very similar. It was you know, smart design, had a hatchback. It was you know, it was potentially it was roomy for its size, it was economical. It was not a bad car, you know, even though at the time we all ridiculed it.
Oh yeah, yeah, I remember, you know I got my car, I guess it was seventy two seventy three and I had a sixty eight Mustang and I was looking at the new Mustangs. Its like, those are horrible. If I had the money, I wouldn't want that. It was so huge.
I remember from the Bond movie Diamonds Are Forever, there was a scene where they're chasing where they're you know, he's driving the Mustang and he goes down an alley and then there's a ramp and he gets it up on two wheels and he goes down through the alley on two wheels. The guys who did that were out
of Tampa, where I lived. They called themselves a Hurricane Hell Drivers, and they would always perform at the State Fair and they could go all the way around this dirt track on two wheels, and they did that stunt all that I'd seen that stunt so many times. It was a lot of fun to see that's done in the film. But they did it with one of those gigantic mustangs of seventy three Mustangs that were, you.
Very pressive stuff, very aggressive style.
Huge. Yeah.
The Pento, I guess I Karen had the Pento, and that it had was not a hatchback. It had a trunk, and that trunk was the thinnest piece of sheet metal I've ever seen on any car I've ever been around. And when you slam the trunk, it would just vibrate.
And we had, you know what, Yeah, in the Pinto's defense, you know, and in Leiah Coco's defense, who at the time was the Ford Vice president of North American operations. That car was brought to market for just under two thousand dollars when it first came out, and like most of the economy cars at that time from American car makers,
it was real real drive. To real real drive is exclusively for affluent people, because you can't find anything that's real real drive anymore that isn't basically a luxury, luxury branded vehicle. So this is a measure again of what we've lost. You could get a Pinto with a real real drive layout, and you remember when we were in high school, people would put V eights and Pentos vegas and things like that, and it was all kinds of fun, yere with a little front wheel drive car.
Right, it's too complicated. Yeah, when you go back and you look at there's a company called Flying Miana they put they cram in really big engines up to V eight, like a Corvette V eight engine LS one, and they started doing that with the older ones, but it got successively more difficult for them to do it. By the time they got to the third generation of Yana had a lot of electronics in it, and then this fourth generation which just came out, well, I don't know, maybe
it's been about five or six years now. They it took forever for them to do it. They had to hire specialists to do the electronics and everything to change out the motor and then put in a bigger, more robust transmission in it. It took them forever to do that because of all the electronics and how complicated.
You're very expensive. Yeah, everything now is an integrated system. So you know, if you bought, for example, a twenty two charger with the V six engine that standard in it, and you wanted to put the HEMI that you could have gotten in the V eight engine, that's almost impossible to do from an economic, economical and technical point of view,
because it wouldn't be worth doing. You know, you literally got the entire car, all of the electronics, because it won't it won't mesh, it won't accept a different engine than the one that came with it from the factory. The computer, all the related equipment won't work with it. So you know, I have a seventy six trans am as you know, and I can put any engine I want to in there easily if I felt like it, and as long as it physically bolted up, it will work.
And everything else in the car will continue to work because there's separate systems. Sure, not interconnected systems.
Oh yeah, yeah, everything was interconnected on it. Getting back to the Pentow thing, you know, again what you began by saying in terms of people being able to pick something that they can afford, Karen was just starting out as a teacher. She didn't have any money. She could get a used Pentow and I think it was under a thousand dollars and you know, she didn't have to go into massive debt with it. It was stripped down, it was bare bones. And again it was an older car.
But somebody stole that car and and.
They came and gave it back to you.
Well, what happened was it was she got a water leak, and it was a slow leak, and it was the middle of the week and I said, let's wait a couple of days and I'll fix it on the weekend.
And so she.
Would carry out this jug of water for the next two days to fill it up before she would take it to work, and she could make it. You know, they're in back by just topping it up because it was a slow leak. And so she goes out in the morning to with her jug of water and her car's gone. You know, it was parked in front of the apartment she's running. And she called me up and says, now, you brought me home yesterday, right. J just couldn't believe
that somebody would steal this car. And they did steal the car and they had it for about thirty days. But the insurance company paid her for it. Is because I imagine they ruined the engine, probably ran it without any any water in it. But they paid her the full amount. And actually she made a little bit of money on the deal because she had gotten a really good price on it. But yeah, it was it was very bare bones and everybody was joking about did you
leave the engine running? In a bad neighborhood? Would steal in that car?
You know? But they take it a laugh about it now, you know.
And again here's another related thing, you know, housing, to get back to that issue. Because of zoning loss. You know, people who are just coming up and wanting to buy their first house. Used to be that you could find affordable little houses, you know, the starter home they called it. Now you can't because everything in the development is the same, and you know, it's only for people who can afford
a four or five hundred thousand dollars mortgage. What happens to the people who maybe want to spend one hundred thousand because that's all they've got.
Yeah, that's right, and they're pushed.
Out of the market effectively. And that's just exactly the same thing that's happened with cars, and cars I think set the predicate.
For that, you know, and Raleigh, not Raleigh, Austin.
They just they've got a neighborhood that they're doing three D printed houses with con and it's kind of interesting to watch them come together and I thought, well, are they going to make them affordable? No, they didn't make them affordable. They're extremely expensive houses. And it's like, you know, when is somebody going to address that lower end of
the market. I mean, here, you've got a situation where there's not a lot of labor, and yet you know it's supposed to be able to save some money by having the three D printed things. Like, what is the advantage of this thing if it's going to be expensive? And they've got an entire neighborhood of three D printed houses, but they're extremely expensive, and I think they're more than the medium price of the house. I don't know, it's difficult.
Austin's kind of a strange market has been going up and going down, so I don't know really how to compairs.
But isn't it ironic when you think about it, that we hear this endless prattle about democracy. Democracy is the deified word, and yet there's extremely little democracy in the economy. You know, we don't have choice anymore. In the economy.
Everything is dictated to us from the top down. And the effrontery of it because the people who are dictating it are extremely affluent and people who can afford to buy anything, and they're telling the people who don't have that much money, and particularly young people are trying to get a leg up and start, you know, start out in life that no, you can't have that, you can only have this, and you can't afford it well to.
Bad Yeah, oh no. They want to dictate everything to us.
They want to dictate what we eat, even, I mean all this bird flu stuff, you know, focusing on yeah monkey pock's now.
But the bird flu the way they focused.
On it, you know, where they were killing unnecessarily killing massive numbers of chickens and new Zealand. They did kind of the same thing with bees that produced Manuka honey, which is extremely expensive. But then when this time around this year bird flu, they start testing all of the milk and the meat and stuff. It's like, why aren't you testing the eggs if it's bird flu? Right, it's because they want to end meat and dairy. They talk
about that. They want to dictate everything to us. Where we can go, what we can wear, where we live. You will own nothing. We're not even going to be able to afford electricity at the rate that they are ramping everything's up, they're ramping the grid down. You and I have talked about it for a long time about how they're forcing everything onto electric grid while they shut down power plants, and now with AI coming in, it's making it really impossible. But yeah, everything is about them
dictating terms to us. It's a neo feudalism, it really is.
And it's very cleverly done too. You know, they've learned a lesson. I think they were framing. From outright outlawing things, what they do is they outpriced things.
That's right, that's right.
So you know, it's getting to the point where average people cannot afford to eat meat anymore, and it's not banned. You can have a stake if you want to say, if you can afford a stake, and you know, continue to jack the prices up, it's going to get to the point where almost nobody accept that very affluent can afford a stake. You know, they're open about it when they talk about this carbon credit thing. You know that
Elon Musk has taken advantage of it. But now they want to make it so that each of us has a carbon footprint which we're not allowed to step out of, and if we step outside of our carbon footprint, then we get hit with carbon taxes.
Yeah.
So you know, if you use too much gas, if you drive too far, if you eat too much meat, whatever it may be. You know, they have a mathematical formula that they can use to say, well, that results in the emission of so much carbon dioxide, and accordingly, you have to pay for it. You know, they frame this as the polluter pays. They're are really working over time to frame and characterize this harmless inert gas that's necessary for life as a pollutant.
Yeah, and who do you pay? You pay them? Right?
You buy an indulgence from them, because there's King of the world. You know, they're the pope that you're buying indulgence from to pollute it. It's absurd. I just can't believe how how people are being taken in by this climate scam. But then when you look at what happened on the pandemic stuff and the fact that you know, you're still running your diaper report, people are still scared to death of this stuff, and they're still you know,
they're still pushing the mask. Earlier in the program, I talked about this influencer who was a sociologist and worked for some universities and went to work for New York Times and wrote some articles defending the flip flopping of the mask recommendations, and they nominated her for a Pulitzer Prize. And she is cutting down scientists who are doing control
studies and have done control studies. This one institution did them as early as two thousand and seven, but I had one that went back to two thousand and two where they were talking about the fact that masks don't work for any of this stuff.
But they become very astute in using psychology to use people's innate good nature against them because most people are decent people and they don't want to be the source of harm. They don't want to be a problem. So you get them to think that, well, if you don't wear a mask, you're going to kill grandma. If you eat meat, well you're causing the climate to change. So
you're a bad person. It's really adroid and it's really vicious, and I hope to God we can figure out a way to come back this because if not continue, life on this earth is going to become literally hell on Earth.
Oh yeah, everything is about making sure that you don't offend somebody, that you don't harm somebody else. You know, your mask is there to protect me, uh, you know, just like your vaccine is there to protect me. Because the masks and the vaccine they know, people know they don't predect, so you've got to wear one. And it's like,
what difference does that make. It's absolutely insane. But let me ask you about this because you mentioned there's a place that has some unusual cars down not too far away from you.
Is that where you saw this right hand drive seventy?
Yeah, that's a very interesting article and I'm interested to know if you've made a decision. I tell people the preppers dilemma, tell them what your was about this.
I am contemplating violating my own prime director I've lived by since I was in high school, which is to live below my means and to avoid debt to the extent possible. I never for the past twenty years and bought a thing that I could not afford to pay for at the time that I purchased it, because I've I think that debt is cancer.
It's bad.
But you know, we live in chaotic and crazy times, and maybe it makes sense to make an exception. And the exception that I'm contemplating making in this case is for one of these these neat JDM right hand drive export only models that you couldn't have gotten in the United States thanks to Uncle Sam. It is a ninety one Toyota land Cruiser, which is which is powered by a mechanically injected diesel engine with no turbo, that has
manual four wheel drive, a manual transmission, analogue everything. There's nothing electronic about it. You don't even need a battery to start the thing. If you've got a hill, you know, just just roll it down a hill and it'll start and run. It doesn't need anything, you know, and I thought to myself, Wow, that might be a really great thing to have in the months and years ahead potentially.
So you know, I can't afford to cut a check for it, but I've been thinking about, well, maybe just this once, I can take on a little debt to get something like that, because you know, it really could be the difference between able to get around without walking or pedaling in the future, because it's you know, it's these old diesels will burn practically any kind of oil. They don't have they don't have particulate traps, they don't
have electric fuel injection. So as long as you can get some type of oil, whatever it happens to be, you can, you know, you can operate your vehicle. And that makes it a very viable viehicle to me, to my way of thinking. So I haven't come to a decision yet, but I'm I'm I'm definitely ruining it about in my head.
So you haven't come a decision yet.
I saw the article and I guess it's a couple of days old, and you are asking the readers to uh to chime in on this and let you know, I mean, what are you taking a pole?
Is that what it is?
Kind Yeah, because I've got I've got one of the things that I've I've come to very much appreciate, and it was inadvertent about my site, is that there are a lot of really thoughtful, bright, well educated people who and I learned a lot from the people who do and I take I take their advice on a lot of things. And it was interesting because people fell on either side of the dividing line. Some said, yeah, this is this is something that's justifiable, this is something that
makes sense, and others said, don't do it. Uh, And there's good reasons on both sides. And I still haven't come to my own decision about what to do.
Yeah, that's that's interesting.
You got another article, I see you, you see me talking about the Ford patent, which you and I have.
Talked about this for the longest time.
That it's inevitable that you know, they've got all the tools, and they've had them for a while. If anybody uses a map on your phone, the map app, you know that it knows what the speed limit is wherever you are, and so all you have to do is add a little bit of something to it. So that it can snitch on you, and that seems to be what they've got in the patent. You know, you and I should have patented that. And then if which file that people have filed ideas for you know, it was there was
a patent. We're showing pictures on an electronic device or something, and they're collecting money from all these smartphone manufacturers. I mean literally, you and I should have hired a lawyer and filed a patent for that because we could see it coming years ago.
You know, we saw that happen.
All of this. We both have a conscience for all the hard effects.
Yeah.
Yeah, this is really Willian, though entirely predictable. Forward it file the patent or basically an elaboration of technology that
already exists. Of course, they claim it's only for law enforcement purposes, but essentially the one to use the tech that's already embedded in practically every vehicle that's been made since roughly about twenty fifteen, to use one vehicle vehicle A, to note the speed of another vehicle vehicle B, and to transmit data about the fact that that vehicle B is exceeding the speed limit to the authorities, or to
the insurance mafia. So it's essentially to turn every car on the road into kind of a narc and you know, it means that it's a panopticon. Every time you go outside, you know somebody is literally watching you.
Wow.
And as you say, we've been talking about this for many years, and they talk about this as a hypothetical, a theoretical, something that might come to pass. No, it's already come to pass. You. Almost all new cars have cameras built into them, and the cameras watch the car ahead of them, to the side of them, and behind them. They have speed limit recognition technology, so the vehicle knows not only what the speed limit is on the road that you happen to be driving on in real time.
You know, that's updated constantly as you drive, but then it can juxtapose that with the speed that you're driving, and therefore it can tell that you're speeding, you're driving faster than the speed limit. And because the car has the ability to transmit the data that it collects, well, look, it can tell the insurance company, oh, you're speeding. It can tell the government you're speeding. It can say where
you've been, where you're going. All of these things, so you know, it's just a matter of all of this now sort of coalescing. Bits and pieces of it have been added to cars for roughly the last twenty years or so, and now you can see the picture and it's almost there. It's almost become completely coalest and it's soon to be activated. And I think that's, by the way, part of the reason why a lot of people are
deciding to opt out of a new vehicle. They're saying, you know, I think I'll pass I think what I've got, And a lot of people are saying, you know, I think I'm actually going to go back in time and I'm going to go get myself something older. It's analog that doesn't have any of this tech in it, so that I control my car and I might be spied on and data mined by my car.
Yeah, but the problem is that, you know, you make that decision, but the problem with this is that it's these other new cars that are spying on you, even if you've got an old analog thing. You know, it's now like invasion of the body by fisher snatchers.
You know, you know, there are always ways to get around that, and you know, and you probably agree with me, you tell me totally. I'm the kind of person who would refrain from doing anything quote unquote illegal, because you know, we don't. We're trying to do the right thing, right, But there comes a point when the system itself becomes an outlaw that your only option is to become an outlaw too, and to stop playing along with these games
that they play. So you can do things like, I don't know, put a farm use plate on your vehicle that isn't specific to your vehicle, It just says farm use on it. They can't identify you that way, or maybe slap some mud on your license plate. Oops, so you know, I went off for a little bit awesober and they can't see what your number is. Do all of these things. There's nothing imral about it. When the system is immoral, you have a right to defend yourself against it.
Oh yeah, we we thought about that and came to our own conclusions about that four years ago when they're talking about vaccine passports and all the rest of this stuff, and it's like, I'm not playing that game. I'll play a different game. And I didn't see any moral qualms with that at all. I think as a matter of fact, you know it is they like to put this guilt trip on you. You need to do this to save grandma? Do you need to do this to save your neighbor?
And it's like, no, I'm resisting what you're doing in order to save grandma, in order to save my neighbor, in order to save my grandkids. Right, I'm going to resist you because you're the problem, and I'm going to do whatever I need to do to resist you. With all this stuff, and so some of it is passive, some of it is active nullification of what they're doing.
I absolutely agree with you.
I think what they're doing is really turning every new car into some kind of a Stazi snitch to try to, you know, to surveil us. And it's this obsession that they have, and I think in a sense it's kind of a sign of weakness. They're so paranoid because they're worried that somewhere somebody is going to be doing something that is going to push back against their power. And they've got to follow and observe and track and predict
everything that everybody's going to do everywhere. So they got cameras everywhere, and now they think well where else could we put a camera? And it never ends, they can always.
Never facet of it is that there's this underline puritanical meanness to it, you know, this this sense that if you don't do things the way they think they ought to be done, then you're effectively a criminal and you deserved whatever punishment they decide to levy against you. It's really a hideous kind of psychology behind it. And Americans used to have an instinctive dislike of busy bodyism, you know.
They used to not like the nosy neighbor who peered through the blinds, you know, to see what you were doing in the backyard. America has been undefined by busy bodyism, you know, and of course people have been conditioned to that, you know, for twenty years now. Back during the reign of George welb a Bush, I always refer to him as a chimp because he's a Semian imbecile. Form did my language toward but you remember, if you see something, say something, I mean, it was right out of East Germany.
It was so profoundly Unamerican to have that kind of attitude toward people, you know, and unfortunately now that has become frankly, I think a very common kind of attitude that people have. What's what are they doing? It looks suspicious. I've got to call the cops. Yeah, so this is your business and leave other people alone.
Oh yeah.
Look at Tim Waltz during the during the lockdown stuff. He had a snitch line, you know, uh, hot line to snitch on other people that had ten thousand calls that were made to it. So they had people in Minnesota that were taking him taking him up on it. Take a look at the threats from this bureaucrat in the EU.
Uh.
Even the other bureaucrats are like pulling back. Wait a minute, we don't want to tell people where we're going yet. You know, I call him. His name is Theory Breton. I call him conspiracy Theory Breton. The guy was actually his dad was a bureaucrat, So I call him an s ob son of a bureaucrat.
But he was he's gonna he thinks that it's his.
Uh, you know that he ought to get involved and say that our political candidates in our election don't have the ability to speak into debate things. I mean, and it's to me, the most amazing thing about about this Trump Musk thing. People are, you know, on both sides of political divide. They're taking a look at some of
the things that they said. But to me, the most important thing about it was that why aren't all Americans outraged about the fact that some bureaucrat in Europe would think that he could shut down a discussion with a political candidate.
Yeah. If anything good has arisen out of what's been happening is that we're seeing a clarification. You know, the focus is now clear. It used to be that you could describe what's going on so well. They you know, they're just trying to do the right thing. They have good motives. They don't have good motives. They're evil. Evil and that's not too strong a word. They're evil people,
and you can see they're evil. You can see their desire, their punitive desire to punish anything that they don't like, including if you're simply somebody who has stated an objective fact about you know, the best example I think I can pull up about that if you point out that, well, you know, Leah Thomas is a man. Yeah, you know, you know, I'm sorry, you know, it's not a matter
of his hurt feelings. He's a man, and it's it's just you can't change biology by putting on different clothes, you know, And to say something like that, now they characterize that as hate speech, and you know that is and ought to be extremely alarming. When the truth, when facts become hateful, you have a real problem.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, I always refer back to remember the Goldwater slogan kind of a paraphrase of that. Yeah, it's a extremism in defense of free speech is no vice, and moderation of content is no virtue.
Because it's always done feelings. You know, it is ridiculous.
When you look at this, and this is one of the justifications of that, sob. Breton had, and that was we've got to look at anything that is hateful. Uh, and you know we're doing this just to protect people. That's kind of like the Ministry of Love from orwell, you know, he's combining the Ministry of truth along with the Ministry of love. You can't say anything that is false or misinformation. You can't saying that hurts somebody's feelings.
And it's like, wow, you've just rolled together to two theries.
That the world side.
It's to me just as such a self evident thing that free speech. The truth has nothing to fear from free speech, you know. I mean, if something is false, it will be established that it's false pretty readily. You know. This suppression of pre speech has one objective, and that is to stifle the truth and facts that are uncomfortable to certain people.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, it is so fundamental, and we see it as being more and more fundamental all the time. For years we would say, well, you know, the Second Amendment is there to protect the First Amendment.
I think it's the other way around.
I think the First Amendment was there first because I think it is absolutely the most important one, because you know, they didn't use a gun on us in twenty twenty. What they did was they use lies, propaganda, censorship, all of those types of things. Those are the weapons that they used against us. And I really think that it
showed that the pen is mightier than the sword. That kind of psychological gaslighting that they were able to pull on people, creating fear, distrust, snitching, and all the rest that was done because of mass violations of the First Amendment. And so it really is the paramount one I believe.
I think if ultimately implicitly, if you're not free to speak, you're not free to think. That's right, that's the bottom of the line. And once you're not free to think and to hold true to your own convictions and your own conscience and what you think is correct and right, you have no freedom. Everything else's meetings.
That's right.
Yeah, yesterday I was talking a little bit about this new platform called Noster Tom that Dorsey what's his name, Jack Dorsey, that you know, he's thrown his weight behind, and it is supposed to be, you know, this independent system where you can have social media, you can have content like we produce and stuff, you know, and people can't even pay you for it. And so it's a way of bringing freedom back to the internet. But what he said was he said, it's not really about free speech.
It's really about being able to think freely. But that really comes from the free speech violations. You know, that that was the targeting of the way that we think, and that behavioral manipulation that is there, that you used a violation of the First Amendment to do that, you know. So yeah, but hopefully something will come of that. I don't know. I'm just starting to look at that, but it might be something that we all need to get involved in. So anything, what else is on your mind.
We only got about a minute and a half here, So you know, what.
About my interview with the parasite? Did you catch that one?
Yes, yes, that's right. I saw that. The property taxes because you talk about not owning anything. As long as we got property taxes, as everybody's pointing out, you really don't own your home, right.
Well, the thing that astounded me most, well, what happened was an assessor. You know, a government agent came to my house the other day to assess my profit, and I just I got to thinking about the assiscient way that most Americans just accept the idea that some government guide can show up. But what you think is your place to assess, to determine the value of what you putatively supposedly own, so that they can decide how much money they're going to charge you for being allowed to
continue to occupy what you think is your home. Ye know, I ranked about the property tax a lot because I think the property tax is even more pernicious fundamentally than the income tax, because if you didn't have the property tax, at least you could at some point own your home or at least aspire to it and have a place that was truly yours. And in that case you wouldn't need income. Would you could be taxed in order to
pay the property taxes. That's right, So you know, it's just it shocks me that people have accepted this, is this idea that you will never own your home, that you have to pay rent to the government forever until you did.
And no politicians will talk about that.
It's really amazing that they won't even they won't even talk about that. It's such a powerful control. And we've seen them confiscate property and sell it for you know, one percent of the value of the home. It absolutely is insidious. Eric Peters, Eric Peters autos dot com, thank you so much for joining us. Eric always again, thank you, thank you, have a good day, and thank you folks for listening.
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