Joining us now, and it's always a pleasure I have Eric on it's been too long since we talked. Eric Peters of Eric Petersautos dot Com a real soulmate when it comes to the issues of liberty and mobility as these companies like to call it. But you know, it's really driving cars is what we think of we think of mobility. I'm not looking at getting into some self driving taxi and I'm not looking at I don't.
Think of that as mobility.
I think of mobility as being able to use a car to go where I want when I want, and not have to follow a schedule from some mass transportation thing or get into a car that's owned by these corporate conglomerates.
But thank you for joining us, Eric, Oh, thank you, David.
I always enjoy being here. And by the way, whenever I hear that word mobility, I almost think to wheelchairs. Yeah, I'm that guy. Well, I enjoyed driving and.
They want to break our legs, don't they.
I mean, they sure seem to want to. And it's really something, you know, when I think about how this country has changed in that respect just over the course of the last forty years. You know, when I was in high school, most guys loved cars, and a lot of girls like cars too. Right now, you know they have succeeded so effectively in alienating people from cars. I get it. You know, they've become appliances, they've become soulless, and on top of that, they become just impossibly expensive
for ordinary people to even consider buying anymore. So no wonder people are turning off to cars, and that's unfortunate. Getting us back to this whole idea of mobility, which really just means, as you said, being able to just go where you want to go without being leashed, you know, without without having to put your take your hat off and beg.
For Yeah, there was a song about that, you know, got to go where you want to go, do what you want to do.
What happened to that?
America?
Yeah?
What happened to that song? We don't hear that anymore.
It's kind of like the other thing we used to say when when I was younger, people would say, somebody say can I do this? And it's like, hey, so free country. You don't hear anybody say that anymore, do you?
No? I don't think that for anybody say that since probably nine to eleven, twenty five years now. But that's you know, at least that's a sign of psychological health. At least people aren't so deluded as to think that we still live in a free country.
That's right.
But they are deluded enough to think that they should make a federal case out of everything. That was the other thing, Hey, don't make a federal case out of it, you know, if somebody is making a big deal out of it. But now we make a federal case out of everything. Every problem must be solved and managed by government, and it has to be done by government at the highest level. And not even that, but now it has to be done by the president, who will save us
from all evil. It's this messianic figure, you know. I was just talking yesterday about this article out of the Atlantic and they were talking about a study that was done by some people of the UK. They came the same conclusions that Strauss and how did about the fourth turning. They went back five thousand years of history. One of the things they said was, you know, the the corruption and the decay and institutions, but also people start getting
very messianic about their leaders. I thought, yeah, that's what I see all the time about MAGA. You know, it's got to be Trump. He's got some special mission from God, you know, he's specially annointed it and all the rest of this stuff. It is truly amazing. They're so desperate for a messiah that they'll even project that onto somebody like Donald Trump.
It's sometimes it's jaw dropping. I'm a professional writer, so usually I'm not at a loss for words, but when it comes to Trump, I often find my job heading the floor. My eyes bottle like cash Betel, and I what am I going to even say about this stuff?
That's right? It truly is amazing.
Well, you told me when we were just connected and you said there's some interesting news about Miada that I don't think I'm gonna like.
What is that news?
Well, just some background. The Miata has been around since nineteen eighty nine. They introduced it as a ninety model, and it has been for many decades one of the most successful models that Mazda has ever brought out. Because anybody's driven one will tell you it's just it is one of the most enjoyable fun cars that you can possibly get and drive. The problem is that it's gotten to be pretty expensive. The current model twenty twenty five,
the base price is nearly thirty thousand dollars. To put that in some perspective, back in nineteen ninety, it was just over thirteen thousand dollars. Now, granted, some of that as inflation, and some of that, of course, are what I call compliance costs. You having to have multiple airbags in the things, and all of the other stuff that's been added to vehicles that has been raising the cost.
People talk about inflation, and of course that's true, but the thing that's important to understand is that people's earning power hasn't tracked with the devaluation of buying power. That's really what inflation is. So back in nineteen ninety, regular Americans could afford to have two cars or even more, to have the fun car they get, the Miyada as the weekend car, the track car, the fun day.
Car, right, summer car. Yeah yeah, But.
They also had you know, you've got to have something that has more than two doors and more than two seats. If you've got kids, you've got a family, you're going to need something that's practical. So they would buy the practical car for that purpose. But they'd have the Miata
for fun. Well, now things have gotten to be so tight that most people can only afford one car, if they can even afford that, So there aren't many people left it who can still afford a thirty thousand dollars fun car like a Miada, and a thirty thousand dollars crossover on top of that, and the cost of insurance and everything else that goes along with it. So what are they doing. Well, when you're faced with a choice between the practical and the fun, most people are going
to have to pick the practical. That's just the way life is. So it's not that the Maata has lost its appeal. The problem is that there are not enough people anymore who can afford it to sustain the car as a viable enterprise for Mazda. And so apparently that's why they're thinking about canceling it.
Wow, Well, I got mine, you know, as not as long as the government doesn't find some way to declare it illegal on the streets.
So I'm okay with that, and I did have mine.
And from a practical standpoint, there's this eric Groceries have gotten so expensive that about all we can fit in the car will fit in the.
Back of it, right, groceries won't it.
That's right.
And there's another facet to this that's kind of interesting. An additional rumor is that they're not going to cancel it, but what they're going to do is put a hybrid drive train into it for the next generation. The current car has been out since I think twenty sixteen, so it's getting a little old, you know, in terms of product cycles, and that the reason for that is the reason why you're seeing so many hybrid vehicles now everything.
It used to be that there was the Prius and maybe one or two other hybrid cars on the market, and they were marketed chiefly toward people who really wanted hyper efficiency above everything else. You know, there's a market for that.
I wanted to a virtue signal about their greenness that too.
But now you may have noticed if you look at the new car landscape, practically everything is hybrided now, you know, to some degree or another, either a mild hybrid or
a full hybrid or something. And the reason for that, of course, has to do with the federal government continuing to require ever stricter mileage and so called emission standards, which chiefly means carbon dioxide, that awful gas that plants have used to metabolize and produce oxygen for us, so that we grieve Trump by the way, today is supposedly going to make an announcement about CAFE the corporate average fuel economy standards, and we'll see whether it's any meaningful
reduction or simply to kind of riff on or Well's nineteen eighty four. Remember when when the people were so happy because big Brother had decided to increase the chock ovation, when in fact, of course it had been decreased. So what they had been hinting at was that they were going to just roll them back or keep them at
where they were in twenty twenty. Well, the reason everything's being hybridized right now is precisely because the only way to comply with the twenty twenty standards was to build these hybrids, which cycle the engine off as often as possible and put smaller and smaller engines in cars. It's the only way that they can achieve compliance with these
federal dictats. So unless we see them actually roll back significantly, or better yet eliminate it altogether, I think we're going to see more and more hybrids, and we're also going to see fewer and fewer interesting cars like the Miata available for people.
Well, in terms of what Trump is doing, anything less than a complete shutdown of the CAFE regime is not anything that I would be favorable of or applaud. But if they roll it back a little bit, you know, it'll be pushed back with the next one. What they really need to do is to go back and change the or get rid of Nixon's EPA and take away their power to regulate air pollution. Right, that is the emission standards that needs to be taken away from the EPA,
and the e PA needs to be shut down. I mean, let's not just stop with the CAFE rules. Let's get rid of the EPA, and let's get rid of this finding that they can they can tell us about.
All these gases, because that is a real fraud. We've got.
Ev pollution is being ignored for this fake climate crisis. Is the headline of a What's Up dot Com article, and it's absolutely true they ignore the pollution from the evs. But I think the biggest glaring hypocrisy with all of this, as in the past, been that they would ignore the two biggest polluters on Earth, China and India. They could make as many power plants as they wanted to and continue to make them, put no cleaning devices on them whatsoever.
And this was supposed to address a global issue. Well, how does that address a global issue? It's nonsense. But now we've had this kind of come home in the sense of the AI data centers. They want to put these AI data centers out there, so they're obviously not interested any missions anymore. And this has really made outraged a lot of the environmentalists that are out there. But it is just another example of having real hypocrisy. It's
not a real problem. It certainly is not existential, and it is if it's in their advantage to do it, and it is in their advantage for the AI, So because that's all about surveillance and control, that is the killer app And so they're going to do whatever they have to take. And they don't care if we own anything. They don't care if we're able to go anywhere, and they don't care if we've got any electricity. You know, you and I have said that for the longest time.
You know, they don't even want us to have electric vehicles. They don't want us to have electricity. Nevertheless, you know, own a car, So that's where this stuff is all going. But you know, when we talk about the Miata, that is such a perversion of the whole idea. The whole idea of the Miata was to make it incredibly light and simple, and so a lot of times, you know, people talk about modifying the miatas. I mean, there's a company called Flying Miata, and it's kind of interesting what
they do with it. Since it's such a lightweight car. They would shove in a V eight inch and to the Miata, and I would read with curiosity about it. But it was something that I never wanted because then you've got to get this heavy transmission. And that was one of the nice things about the Miata was how it shifted and very responsive and how it could turn
on a dime. And it was all really about being a momentum car rather than a zero to sixty car, right, And so if these people are going to put in there, you know, all the added weight and all the rest of the stuff to make it a hybrid and to make it complicated, to make it expensive, they might as well cancel it.
Well, I agree, and it just speaks to the kind of tone deafness of the people who are running these car companies. You'll see this happening across the industry. For example, the Dodge. The people in charge of Dodge who thought it would be a fine idea to take the Challenger and the Charger, which were popular costs sold well, and turn the thing into an Evy, and not only ev with a base price that was twenty thousand dollars higher on pre gas engine model, and they thought that that
would sell. They're showing what I'm trying to get at is that they were showing contempt for their own buyer demographic.
Oh yeah, yeah. Or Jeep. I'm sure you wear Jeep. You know.
Jeep is this French company, and they have upscaled the Jeeps so much that nobody can their market can't afford it. People wanted something that was rugged and affordable, and that's the same kind of thing they're doing to the Miata. They don't want to everybody wants to make exactly the same car, and they all want to upscale everything because they understand how expensive cars are getting and they know that only they're really rich can afford this.
Stuff. So it's going to become a plaything for the rich. Probably.
I don't know if it'll be in my lifetime because I'm getting at the end of it, but probably in your lifetime you'll probably see the idea that, you know, owning a car is like having a private plane today.
You know, oh sure, it's going to be a reversion to the early days of the car car industry, the car world. If you went back to say about nineteen oh five or so, the only people who owned a car. We're extremely wealthy people. You know, go watch episodes of Downton Abbey, the you know the BBC show about that.
Era, or Toad of Toad Hall.
Right, Yes, he could aboard a car and he didn't really care what the fines were like. He was very much like Elon Musk who opened up his uh uh. He opened up a couple of businesses. They're not too
far from when we used to live in Texas. He had boring and he had I think it was I can't remember, maybe it was SpaceX or something, but it was not it's not did anything to do with the launching thing, and and he was doing violating all kinds of rules from the Department of Transportation, as well as dumping waste water directly into the Colorado River.
He didn't care.
They kept finding him and they gave him the maximum amounts of fines and he didn't care. So they said, well, we need to raise the fines up. And it's like, well, you know what, they raised the fines up. It's going to be applied against people who can't afford it. Uh, And you're not going to be able to raise the fine up high enough to to affect elon Musk under any circums. So he was kind of like Toad of Toad Hall, you know, right.
You know, here's here's something to kind of explained the point to people who may not be familiar with the history of it. Used to be that when you opened the door of a General Motors vehicle, you would see this little badge on the sill and it would say body by Fisher. You remember that, oh yeah, and that that is something that harkens back to the days of what we are called coach built cars before the Model T. This is around the turn of the turn of the
last century or nineteen hundred or so. If you wanted a car, you went to a coach builder and you would specify what you wanted, and it was all custom everything was made to order. And obviously only very wealthy people could afford a vehicle like that, so it was a rich man's toy. And you know, Henry Ford came along and had the affront rate to simplify the thing and to mass produce the thing that had common parts that were stamped out, and so that anybody who worked
at a Ford plant could afford a car. You know, and for one hundred years afterward, people like you and I, regular people could afford to have a car. Well, they're trying to bring us back to that era when when vehicles were luxury items that only the very affluent people in society could afford. It's really despicable. And I wanted to mention something else to get back to what you were mentioning before about the whole emission slash climate control fraud.
People don't realize that there are evs that you can get in Europe. I did an article the other day about a little car called the micro Microlina. Did you happen to catch that?
No?
I didn't say what Microlina cute as a button? Golly is so nice that they named it twice, right.
What it basically is is a small electric car that's essentially it looks just like the old BMW Isida. Do you remember the Isota.
Was that the one that opened in the front, Yes, exactly.
See, I've actually set in one of those up in Chicago. Yeah, they had it as a display in a garment store there.
So the same concept. It's just a little EV. It's not designed to go ludicrously fast, you know, it's designed to be an urban, suburban, runabout little car. And it costs about sixteen thousand dollars. Why can't we have that? Well? I attack elector cars all the time, but fundamentally, what I'm attacking is the way they're being forced on people and the way alternatives are being taken away from people, not the EV as such, I really don't have a
problem with. You know, why can't people buy a sixteen thousand dollars basic car if they don't need ludicrous speed, they don't need to on the highway for several hundred miles. And the point is, like, if it truly is the case that we're facing this existential threat, the climate is changing, you know, we're all going to die unless we don't
drive electric cars. Well, why wouldn't they want to encourage these affordable little electric cars that people can actually buy as opposed to these elitist cars, these evs that you know, we're allowed to buy fifty thousand, sixty thousand dollars electric cars, but we can't buy the little sixteen thousand dollars electric
car that you can buy in Europe. It just speaks to the disingenuousness of the narrative, the way they're trying to tell you that, you know, you have to make this transition because if you don't, we're all going to die in the climate catastrophe. Well it's nonsense. If that were true, they'd be doing everything conceivable to incur these low cost, efficient, simple little cars.
That's right. It's just like the pandemic.
If they really believed everybody's going to die, they'd let us try some alternatives to their vaccine.
But the plan had been that they were going to lock us down.
Until they got their vaccine ready and then they were going to inject everybody and all the companies harmless with what they did. But you know, that was another smoking gun about that fraud. But you know, as you're pointing out these little little things like that. And I remember there was also the Messerschmidt. Do you remember that that was featured in Brazil. That was the car that the character drove in that. I've never seen one of those in person, but I have set in the bmw Isaeta
I've said in that thing. But you know, these things are basically golf carts just on it, you know, you know.
I mean back when I was in college, I broke a seventy four Beatle. Love the car, but really it wasn't much more than a golf cart, you know, right. It had trouble maintaining sixty five miles an hour on anything, you know that was at all inclined. That was pretty much it cost. You know, if you had a downhill stretch and the wind was at your back, you might be able to get to get up to about seventy five a miles an hour in a Beatle. It was fine.
It was cheap.
It allowed me to get on wheels, you know, so that I didn't have to walk or take a bus. And that's why I'm kind of so annoyed about the fact that you can't buy new vehicles like that little inexpensive ev that's available in Europe, because after all, if that thing we're on the market is a used vehicle, it would probably cost only seven or eight thousand dollars,
you know, after a couple of years of depreciation. And imagine, you know, you're an eighteen year old kid and you know you don't have a lot of money, but you'd like to have a car. So you know, here's a car that you could would work as your first car. And my point is, you know, we're being denied all these alternatives. It's no longer the case that the market responds to what people want what it's what the government demands,
and it's one size fits all. And that's why you know, you hear everybody complaining about, oh they all look the same, Well, there's a reason for that. The reason they all look the same is because they all have to comply with the same government demands.
Right.
Yeah, you remember I grew up in Florida, and so the Volkswagen that I aspired to have was the Dune Buggy.
I tn't care if that was that was practical or not.
And then really doubled down with a Thomas Crown affair that had Steve McQueen driving one of those remembers that I forget what the company was that those we just called them, yeah, may that's all right, the Manx, and we just called them dune buggies for that. But Karen's first car was a Pento, and that was another example. I remember you talk about how that was your your right of passage. That was how you knew you were
an adult and how you now had freedom. I was having the wheels right, and so I remember scrutinizing the stuff and figuring out how much I would have to work in order to save up and buy a Pento. Before you know, I was able to drive. Because they were very cheap. I remember there were like, you know, fourteen hundred dollars or something new. It was incredible how cheap they were. Of course the dollar was I had a lot more purchasing power than that it does now.
But you know, Karen got one of those. It had rubber mats, you know, not carpet, of course, hand cranked windows and all that kind of stuff. The trunk was so thin that when you dropped the trunk, it didn't have a hatchback on hers. But it had a little small trunk that was maybe about a foot wide for deep, you know, and when you dropped it, it just shook
such a thin metal. And of course you know, they were infamous for exploding when hit in the back, but they cut every corner that they could, including the safety equipment, to keep it from exploding. What it was hit on the back, but it was It was what she needed and she was able to get one used and fortunately for her, before anything happened if she had an accident, somebody stole it from her.
We were all laughing about It's like, who would steal this thing?
Not only was it that, but she had a slow leak in her radiator and I was going to fix it over the weekend.
But it was like Thursday.
She goes out to get in the car and she's got her water jug with her that she's going to top it up with before she goes to work, and the car was gone. She called me up and she said, he didn't bring me home last night, right, I drove home last night. He's like, yeah, that's right, she goes, my car has gone. It took us a while to actually pinch ourselves and a wake ourselves the fact that
somebody had stolen the thing. He was like, ooh, it's still this and everybody joke said, you leave it running with the keys in the car and a bad neighborhood or something to get this to happen. But it was transportation and sometimes that's what you need. And they don't want us to have that anymore.
Yeah, no, everybody needs that, you know, Leah Coke. It was at four at the time, and who was responsible for the pinco decreed that it would be kept under two thousand dollars brand new, and they managed to do that. Think about that. Imagine that a brand new car now, granted inflation and everything, but still two thousand dollars for a brand new car, meaning that five or six years down the road, cars like that were abundant and on the used car market for kids who didn't have a
lot of money. I mean, just like you. When I was a age, when I was in high school, I saved the money that I earned from cutting grass and shoveling snow and all that other stuff in my McDonald's after school money so I could buy a car. Yeah, you know, everybody knows that. Today it's almost impossible for a teenager to work a part time job or cut grass and be able to afford anything as far as a car goes, because they're so expensive. And that's really tragic.
It's really sad, and it's hurting not just teenagers who are trying to become adults, but people on the lower end of the economic spectrum. They're limited. Their options are limited. It's not just about, hey, I want to go for a joy ride. If you can't drive to work, your work options are limited. You know, if you can only go wherever the bus goes, where the train goes, that means you can only get certain kinds of jobs, and it probably means you're going to have to live in
an urban area. But guess what, everything's more expensive in the urban area than it is farther out. So really it's a kind of an assault on the you know, it's ironic, isn't it. You know, we've heard from the Democrats and the left for years about the plight of
the working man and the average guy. Well, the average guy and the working man are the ones who are most being harmed by these things, and now it's leached out farther and it's metastasized, and it's beginning to make it very difficult for middle class people oh to have the standard of living that so called working class people had fifty years ago.
I agree, yeah, And it's like what are they What is their end game with all this stuff?
Right?
Is it just to kill us all? Or what is it? Because it doesn't make any sense that they keep taking everything away from everybody. They want to take away our jobs and so forth and put us on a universal basic can come you know what is the endgame with that? It is so apathetical to what Henry Ford was about, as they said, you know, we're going to make the cars cheap enough that the people who work on the
assembly line manufacturing them can afford to have one. And so you know what is the end game for the people they really do hate us. It's this concentration. And that was the other aspect that these people noticed going back over five thousand years, the frustration and the lack of sense of control of your own life, no opportunity and all the rest of this stuff, which is precisely what the agenda is for the technocracy and the people who are around Trump that you know, Peter Thiel and
these Curtis Jarvin types. They want a society that's going to be libertarian for them and authoritarian for us, and that's what they're pushing to. And it's like, how do you think that that's going to be sustainable? People have never put up with that in history, So you know, they may be able to put it in for a short period of time, but I don't think is going to last.
Yeah. Psychologically, it's very interesting. I think part of it is kind of a pathological thing in that it is some people it's not enough to have generational wealth, have enough money, not only for themselves to live without any care whatsoever about financial worries, their kids and their kids kids are going to be completely taken care of. It's never enough. How many billions do you need? Elon Musk's network is what sixty billion or something crazy like that.
I think it's more than that, and it's still not enough. They need more. You know, it's not enough to have a yacht. You have to have two yachts. Then you have to have a private chet, then you have to have four.
The biggest shot, you got to have bigger than the billionaire next door.
Yeah, and so that it's almost as if there's an element of sadism in it. It's not that oh, I've got something really nice. I've got you know, I've got a dimer Mayback. But my neighbor, My god, that guy has a Chevy suburban. The guy down, you know, the customer brass has a Chevy suburban. I don't want him to have that. Yeah, that's somehow diminishment that, you know, I feel. It's only it's only I only feel good
if I'm the only one who has something nice. I think that's part of psychologically what's motivating all of this.
That's right.
I think you're absolutely right, And that's one of the reasons why they buy things like a Mayback because I'm the only one that's got a Mayback, right, Or they they buy a dress or a purse that costs four thousand dollars or eight thousand dollars or something. You know that it's that exclusivity, and then there's only so far that you can go that exclusivity until it's necessary for you to schooed stuff from other people. And that's really where this is all headed. I agree, it is really
a kind of a sickness that's there. But we've always seen that it's an addiction that these people have to money, right, the love of money. It becomes like a drug to them, It really does.
I got another interesting aspect of this, if I might elaborate, just to touch because it's almost a cartoon indictment of capitalism. But it's not capitalism because almost all of these people, and in almost every case, they are acquiring their will through government.
That's right.
First thing we talked about when I had you on was your article about Elon must being the king of crony capitalism, and that was more than a decade ago. We first talked about that, and that, as you point out, was how he got his wealth. I said that earlier in the program. I said, you know, you look at this and so many times you see people who are libertarian or conservative and they want to champion businesses and say business can do nothing wrong and government can do
nothing right. And then the Democrats the other way, right, government can do nothing wrong, businesses and private companies can do nothing right. The reality is is that they've merged and that's what makes it all so evil, and they don't see that, you know, they imagine that we've got a free market or that we have capitalism, but it's not that at all. It's this kind of mixture that we see in China, and we recognize it in China. How they come in and say, well, you're going to
have to give us a piece of that. But we're seeing that in spades now with Trump.
You know, he's.
Using taking over, buying a share of intel, and using government money to start, you know, acquiring assets to own it. I mean that is socialism, Marxism, central planning. All the things that Republicans used to oppose, they now applaud because Trump is doing it.
Yep, they've so poisoned the will. And in addition to that, younger Americans in particular don't know their own history.
That's right now.
Henry Ford could be considered a capitalist. Henry Ford figured out a way to make a better mouse trap, and he didn't use the government at all to subsidize his business. What he did was to make a product that people
could afford. And a very interesting thing about Ford was that the model T got progressively less expensive with each model year because he would fine tune it, figure out ways to make it cost less, and he was able to scale things up and he sold more of them, so he could make more on volume than on individual unit sales. You know, It was such a boon for average people because it liberated them from the yolk of having to be tied to an urban area, to a city. A farmer could buy a Ford model t and he
could use it as a tractor. You know, they made it to be modular, so you know, you could have it out on the farm. And gasoline, of course, was portable, so even in the time before there were gas stations, you could bring gas to where there wasn't any gas. And you know, we've taken this for granted as a civilization, this idea that we can just go where we want to go. That was not the case once, you know, it was almost kind of a feudal order where you
were stuck where you or by circumstances. And the dawn of that age changed that. And now we're reverting back to that age, and we're being dragged back into it because most people just don't appreciate just how good we had it, and they might once it's all gone.
That's right, that's right.
Well, you know a lot of this comes and I've mentioned many times there was an op ed piece that really dropped my jaw when I saw it by the CEO of Lyft I can't remember his name. I don't know if he's still the CEO. But the guy had been an urban planner by education, and so he loved cities and he said cities are the best invention of mankind and cars are the worst invention. And I thought,
this is just so upside down and backwards. Nobody agrees with that in reality, because the reason that we have suburbs, and the reason that we have what these urban planners derisively call urban sprawl, is because people don't like living all pressed up against each other, and they're willing to spend time and money so they can get more space around them. But they hate that because these urban planners
are all about control. And when we look at the when you look at Lyfty, you look at Uber, you know they were all about owning all of the transportation privately, right and making it kind of a fascist run system, not directly owned by the government, as if they would own all the buses and the rails and subways like that, but the fact that they would partner with government to make sure, you know, they do whatever government wants them to do. If they government tells them that David Knight
can't ride anywhere, they would enforce that for them. And so they're all about that kind of a partnership that we see there, and they're all about getting rid of As Travis Kalalnik of Uber used to say, the reason our rides are expensive is because that other dude in the car. We're going to get rid of that other dude in the car. We're going to have self driving cars. That's where we want to go. So who's going to be able to afford to driving these things?
Right?
Because it's not just one sector with artificial intelligence or bodies and everything. They're going for every sector all at once. They're trying to reduce this. There's an MIT report saying that they could get rid of it. I forget how many tens of millions of jobs, but it was massive. It was like maybe twenty million jobs or something. We think we can replace twenty million jobs right now with AI if we get really serious about this and we build the data centers.
And well, they do that because it will increase their profit margin, will reduce their health care costs, something else. So you know, you mentioned how this guy, the lift guy, says that cities are bad and are good, but cities
are good. It's an unconscious confession his subjective value. He personally thinks that cities are great, and he personally thinks that it's bad to not live in them, and doesn't even appreciate that other people might have a different point of view, and if they have a different point of view, you know, their should be stomped. They shouldn't be allowed to have their different point of view. That's the that's the mentality of the people that we're dealing with. They
can't live and let live. They can't say, Okay, I've got a point of view. I like living in an urban hive, I like living in an apartment. You go ahead and live in the country the ability you want to. They can't do that. The whole American idea that we used to have of live and let live, different strokes for different folks. It's just being exterminated by this this arrogant one size fits all. Everybody's going to do the same thing mentality.
I agree.
Yeah, I like evs, so you're going to use an EV right, I'm going to demand that you use it. There's not going to be any other exception. Yeah, I've got a couple of comments here. Birdhouse Blue says, I don't even recognize as the cars today.
They all look the same. That's absolutely right, and.
It's not by accident. The reason they all look the same is because they all have to comply with the same federal regulations and that greatly limits the ability of designers to come up with anything different. Yes, it's kind of like. The best way to understand it if you follow Cup racing. They literally had this template. It's this this thing that they put over the body of the car. The car has to be within those parameters in order to be legal to use on the track. So that's
why the NASCAR cars all looked the same. No matter whether it says whatever or whatever, they all looked the same. And that's the reason why when you go to a car showroom, pretty much all the cars looked like they got stamped out of the same factory and a different badge got put on the fender.
Yeah. Yeah.
He also has a comment he says cars used to have character. You know you're talking about that. That reminds me of the Superbird, And I think it was Richard Petty they did that, remember that it had and they actually sold that for consumers. I had a friend of mine in high school, his dad bought him a road Runner Superbird and had that long extension on the front and it had like the spoiler on the back that was like five feet above.
The trunk and everything.
It was crazy that he was driving this around on the road, but he could do it.
You know.
It was a two hundred mile an hour car.
Fatal.
Yeah, And it really cool thing about stock car racing and those that they literally were stock cars in the sense that they took a production car, you know, and
they turned it into a race car. Now, the cars that you see on a NASCAR circuit, they're all the same tube frame chassis underneath us with this skin on the top that's supposed to vaguely kind of remind you of a Ford or it's not anything at all remotely like a car that you can buy at the dealership, whereas back in the day, like your friend did, you could buy basically Richard Petty's car. Took version of.
Richard Petty's car, And that's what crazy was. You know.
They used to say, you know, went on Sunday, sall on Monday, and it was true because you know, you went to the race, and if you're a Chevy guy and you watched the Chevy win the race, or a Dodge guy whatever. You were happy about that, and you wanted to be associated with that, so you went and bought that car because you thought it was a winner, because it won the race, and there was truth in that. Now, you know, motorsports, at least as far as NASCAR goes.
I know I'm going to get some hate for this, but I consider it to be the World Wrestling Federation of Motorsports.
That's that's funny. But every time I say John in his car, you know, it was really nice guy. And the funny thing about it, he was not the kind of guy that would show off, and he didn't do that with anything else. And he was actually I always felt that he was embarrassed when people noticed his car.
So like, yeah, my dad, those out a character. It was amazing.
Those cars, those those those Daytona Superbirts. Yeah, those cars now are hundreds of thousands of dollars if you want to buy one.
Now.
Back at the day when when they were available to the dealers, they couldn't sell them. A lot of times they would sit on the lot and you know, they would eventually get fire sold to somebody for a budget price, because, like your friend, people felt a little awkward driving around in this thing with this huge wing on the back, you know, and that bullet nose that it had on the front.
Yeah, yeah, extended it that. It's like, yeah, how are you going to park that? Anyway?
I assume that you didn't use that for your parallel parking driving test. It would never fit in the parking space.
It was.
It was crazy, and it was always a lot of fun to see him, And I hope he didn't. Maybe if if he kept it, he's got a lot of money now he could get for that. But yeah, bernhouse Blue also says I used to buy many used cars for five hundred or less back.
In the eighties. Even that's true.
You know, let's talk a little bit about you got an article just came out this week, a solution for a created problem.
Tell us about that.
Oh yeah, Well, we all have experienced the frustration sitting at a traffic light and the light in front of us goes green and as soon as you cross the intersection up ahead, there's another light and it just went red. Oh yeah, and so you know, signal timing. It's a problem, but it's a problem is easily remedied by timing the signals so that generally speaking, on a given stretch of road, most of the lights wult go green sequentially in order so that the traffic can flow well instead of just
doing it the simple way. Now, one of these tech bro companies, associated with the University of Michigan has proposed the fine idea of collating and collecting data being transmitted from your car, your GPS data and other data, so that the system organizes how many cars are on a given stretch of roador to given time, how fast they're moving, and they can use AI to coordinate the lights. Of course, really, what this is about again is monitoring you, collecting data
about you. They swear up and down on a stack of Brave New Worlds that it's anonymized data, but of course it's not. It's only anonymized because they choose it to be anonymized. All of this is tied, particularly to your car. People don't realize. Most people don't know that pretty much all cars nown with it made within the last ten or fifteen years have what they call telematics, which means that they are constantly in communication with the hive.
I call it the hive they're receiving updates, they're transmitting this, and you have no consent and no ability to thwart that. And it's quite remarkable that there hasn't been more outrage as far, at least as far as I'm concerned. I don't like the idea of my car being like my cell phone in that it is controlled by some corporate entity somewhere that can decide that it wants to update it, ie change it, or that it can use the device
to track my movements. Not because I'm a criminal, but because I have I don't want people knowing where I'm going. That's reasonable. I don't feel like I ought to have an ankle bracelet on unless I've actually been convicted of a crime.
That's right. You know.
There was an interesting thing reported on the last couple of weeks, and there was a guy who was pushing back against a bunch of statists who were pushing for some new safety devices or something to be made mandatory on cars. And this is a guy who before he became a politician, he used to sell cars, and so he decided he would go around and see if these people actually had bought these safety devices that were optional
on their cars. So he went around and got their VEN numbers for their cars, looked it up, and found out that these people who were saying, you absolutely have to have this stuff had declined paying for it when they had the option to, and we're going to use their money. So he said, so now you're going to force everybody to buy what you chose not to buy when you had the opportunity to do it. And their reaction to it was like, how dare you get my
VEN number? Look this stuff up. You violated my privacy And this is the most hypocritical thing you can imagine. These are the people who are spying on us with everything, as you point out, in our car and all the rest of it. Of course, there's also the massive flock network of cameras that are out there doing automated license plate reading, and not just the license plate, but they are creating an id profile of your car, looking at
the idiosyncrasies of it. Does it have a dent on the side, or a scratch or this or that, and tracking that literally tracking it for law enforcement all the time, and doing that as a contract, and that is exploding.
That's the kind.
Of public private tyranny that we see over and over again, and I thought it was just the most amazing. I played that clip a couple of weeks and within the last couple of weeks, and the attitude of these people, how dare you do this one? They are mandating stuff for people, and they are spying on people all the time.
It's really interesting to me that, you know, this gets us into the subject of the driver assistance technology, which is related to it. Why is it that it is made standard equipment now in every vehicle even though the overwhelming majority of people do not want this. I can't tell you how many times I get emails and comments whenever I do shows like yours, people say, you know, I despise being parented by my car. I don't like lane keep assistance, I don't like any of that. I
want to turn it off. You can't turn it off anymore. All you can do is turn it down. And it's interesting that these manufacturers, who you'd think would not want to alienate their customers. Why would you put something in a vehicle that most people don't want. Yeah, well, it's because they want it. And then the question is vegu
well why do they want it? And I think the reason is because there's just gradually, piece by piece putting together this in which you will have no control over your car beyond which beyond what they want you to have. So the minute that you go outside the parameters of that, you know the car will correct you and it may get to the point where it just shuts off. It doesn't operate at all if you don't operate it within the allowable parameters. And at that point we might as
well just all sign up for a Johnny cab. And which is ultimately, I think what they really do want.
It is it is and that's why these car companies have been partnerships, in a partnership with government to add all these expensive add ons and all these things that people don't want because it drives the price of the car up and they can charge people for that. But the problem is is that they've kind of you know, one thing that Vladimir Lenin got right was he said, the capitalists will solve the rope that she used to
hang them, and they used to hang these guys. Now is you know, they sold all these safety device ropes to rope you in and now their cars are so
expensive people can't afford it. But they then of course, the solution to that is to get even more into a relationship and a partnership with the government, so that they are the providers with this mobility stuff that's going to be privately owned but will be heavily controlled, and there'll be the government will tell them what to do, and of course you'll have the politicians who will get to wet their beak as the mafia people say. That's basically this is going to operate. It's going to be
a Chinese model. That's why they opened up China for this time.
Inevitably, to speak to your point about not seeing their own self interest, there will have to be a winning of the number of manufacturers, because it just doesn't make sense to have as many manufacturers as there still are producing essentially the same thing. Why not consolidate everything kind of like they did in the Soviet Union, where you could get a lot of maybe after fifteen or twenty years on a waiting list, it's going to be trampont. You know, those are your choices back in the old
Soviet days. And ultimately I see something like that happening. You know, Philip Dick, the great sci fi writer, foresaw this. If you read his novel Blade Runner, they don't get into it, or the novel is do Android stream of Electric Sheep. The movie Blade Runner is the one that people are more familiar with. But in the novel, everything is controlled by what's called the Turtal Corporation.
Yeah.
Everything, It's sort of like, you know, the Amazon of our time. It's just this, Every single consumer good is made and manufactured by this one pyramidal, structured, massive corporation that controls everything. You know, that book decades and decades and decades ago, and here we are, you know, very prescient, and the way it foresaw, you know, what corporatism would, would turn capitalism into.
All these dystopian novels have become a manual these people, I think, yeah, you talk about you'd wait for decades for that. That was one of the best Ronald Reagan jokes. Basically in Russia, right, the guy orders, I enough as a car, let's just say as a washing machine, and he goes, I will have that for you in ten years.
And the guy.
Says afternoon or morning, And he says, why do you ask is ten years now? He goes, well, because I've got the dishwasher coming in the morning. Ten years from now.
Sad, Yeah, because those of us who can remember the way America used to be, you know, never thought America would become like the Soviet Union, that's right, yet rapidly on our way to becoming exactly that.
Well, you know, it's even to the extent that you've got a lot of these conservative influencers. And again, these are not people who are researchers and not reporters. They're not journalists. They are influencers that ought to tell you something. But they're out there trying to rehabilitate Richard Nixon, of all people, our fifty five mile an hour guy who created the EPA and so many other issues out there, and he opened us up to China and he set us down on this path. And I said, you know,
think about it, Conservatives. If you like Richard Nixon, you got to like Henry Kissinger, mister globalism himself.
You know.
But it's amazing how this is all. You know, it's a long term plan that they've been operating on.
You know, with regard to what we talked about at the beginning of the interview, the federal fuel economy standards, you know, I think it's the best way to challenge that is to say, why is the government involved in that at all?
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, what business is it of the government to decree to you or I how many miles for gallon a vehicle that we choose to buy with our own money must get.
Where is that in the constitution? And where is the authority for the EPA and the constitution?
Right?
And it's based on a fatuity, you know. The argument is that if the government weren't doing this, then the meat old automakers would make nothing but gas guzzling cars and we'd all be at the mercy of Big Well, it's nonsense. Before Cafe came along in the early seventies, there were plenty of fuel efficient cars available, so it's a lie. And you know, these these mandates that are coming out the cafe thing cost you money. Yeah, your car gets thirty five miles for gallon, but it also
costs forty thousand dollars. Now you're really not saving any money because you've got this micro engine, turbocharged hybrid augmented thing with a CBT transmission and yay, I'm getting you know, five miles more per gallon than you know, i than the vehicle that costs thousands and thousands of dollars left less. But you know, I guess people just can't do basic math anymore, so they can buy into this nonsense.
That's right.
Yeah, I like this sped piece that you put out the last generation, but this out yesterday. You started by saying, before the nineties, men drove cars and kids rode bicycles without helmets. Now men will wear helmets to ride a bicycle, and kids aren't allowed to ride in a car unless they're strapped in a safety seat. You know that that
is the amazing thing. You know, Travis just had to get a car seat for their son, and of course you know they're talking about, well, this is going to last up until you know, whatever the age is, and and you know, they make the cars so that they have different inserts that you can put in when they're small, and they can keep staying in that car seat forever.
You know, as they get older and older. It's amazing.
And you know one of the hidden costs of that. By the way, with regard to the safety seat mandate, it effectively pushes people to buy a three row suv at some point or across because if you got more than two kids. You know, it becomes just too difficult to fit the seats in the back of the thing, so you need to So then you have to move up and buy this much more expensive vehicle, you know, I you know, I just I missed the days. You know,
when we were kids. You went for a drive, Mom and dad are opened the door, just jump in the car and go.
Yeah, now you got to go. You've got to be able to get in the car and get them into the car seat and all the rest of this stuff. I mean, we just used to climb in these cars. They didn't have seat belts, they didn't have padded dashboards or anything. We used to joke about it. Even when in high school, you know, they started putting in the seat belts. They weren't mandatory yet, and we used to laugh about it and say, yeah, we used to just
somebody have an accent. We just hose the blood off the dashboard and saw the car.
Get sure.
You know, I understand that there is an increased risk. I know some people listening to us might be appalled at what I'm suggesting here, but I think it's gotten to be almost neurotic. No, I think it is neurotic. It is about top fear that pervades our society about what might happen, you know, heaven for fenn. You know, you get in a car and drive down to the mailbox without your seatbelt on, you know you might die. This is the attitude that people have now, and it's
just it's over the top and it's silly. Yeah, and just on a moral level, if you're an adult, you don't need to be parented. Presumably you're grown up, so ease off, leave me alone. I'll make decisions all weigh costs, benefits, risks and reward for myself. You have no right to parent another adult, that's right.
Yeah, they would be absolutely appalled to see what happens in China when we were there like twenty years ago. You know, you got somebody's the family. They don't have an issue v they don't have a car, they got a motorcycle, and they just tell the little kids that are maybe you know, four years old, just hang on, you know, there's no seat belt, there's nothing there. Somehow they managed to survive. I used to always laugh about
the magic school bus. So when the thing would come on and they would start by saying seat belts everybody said there's no seat belts on a school bus. They cover them with laws and yellow paint to make sure that nobody gets hurt. You know, it's always great talking to you, Eric. We're out of time. That went by really, really fast, as it always does. Thank you so much, Eric Peters dot com. Check it out, folks, great sight for news.
Thank you, David, appreciate it.
Thank you.
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