The David Knight Show - INTERVIEW Eric Peters, Rethinking Priorities in Light of What's Coming

Episode Date: August 15, 2024

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Joining us now is Eric Peters. I always love talking to Eric. We share a love of cars and a love of liberty, and that covers a wide range of topics. EricPeters.com is where you'll find a lot of very interesting articles about cars. And I'm 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 is 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 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 rather 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. things are all very nice particularly once you get a little older and you like the idea of having having an air conditioning system that you can turn on to keep you cool but hey when you're 17 or 18 it's kind of nice to be able to go out and buy a 700 dollars lobby that lets you get from a to b you know and that's right and it's one of the reasons why you know when we were that age we became functional adults a lot sooner than the kids today because cars have they've been priced out of cars largely and part of the reason for that is what i like to call this riptide effect of of being comfortable with extravagant debt you know people now think nothing of signing up for a fifty thousand or sixty thousand dollar

indenture that's what you know for a car for the next six years. You're going to be paying $500, $600 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. It was a Carrier's first car was a Pinto. You want to talk about an economy car? It had rubber mats. It didn't have air conditioning. It didn't have power windows. It was pretty bare bones. 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 and power windows and automatic transmission, it kept prices in check because you always had that option. If you wanted to buy the higher end, more more expensive car, you could. But, you know, on the other side of the lot, there was the more inexpensive car.

I remember just after we got out of college, one of my best friends, he just lives down the road from me, he wanted to start a roofing business. And so he bought a brand-new 89 Ford F-150 pickup. Now, it just had the straight-six engine, manual transmission, manual four-wheel drive, and 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, again, it was a real unusual thing to have power windows. My dad would get Cadillacs. He would usually wait until they were like two or three years old. So the appreciation was gone. But he would have power windows. And it's like, wow, look, this has got electric windows. All the rest of the cars, I guess I had for about 10 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. The car was so small, I could reach across and I could roll the passenger window up and down 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 Potemkin 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 $60,000, something like that. And the average price paid for a new vehicle as of last year approached $50,000. 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've 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 overlord 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 jabbed you know i had the financial wherewithal if i had to to ride it out you know and that's a really really a really comforting thing 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

bow my knee, bend my knee 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 bought into this now. for at least the last generation or two it's been it's been normalized 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 in new zealand they did clinical trials and stuff like that but he had gotten out even before the covid stuff and i said so what 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 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 it's just like you know what you're talking about uh they said we've never been happier because we don't have to work for a corporation and uh 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 now 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 um and it's and it's worked out for them that 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. You need to have a title or you're 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 generation that's coming up now that's in their 20s that feels despair hopelessness and anger when they look at the stats that you know 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 40. 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 lennon did uh land and food you know we'll take care of you don't worry the oppressors when in fact they could be the whole reason for the problem has to do with exactly the machinations of these machinators 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 these kids they don't know you and i grew up in a different world you know people who

are who are under 40 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 could be in the future. That's right. Yeah, I think a lot of them are seeing that, you know, the university situation is a Potemkin 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 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 you really do need to adjust what you aspire to, what you think is, you know, 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 got an interesting article. I said, this is the first one I want to talk to you about. The Anodyne Exotic. And I'll tell you, as somebody who owns a little tiny car

that doesn't have a whole lot of horsepower, but I love to drive it, that really hit home. The Anodyne Exotic. You know, years ago, Ron Atkinson, who's Mr. Bean, and he's very successful, of course. He got a lot of money as a movie star. He talked about how he's got hyper cars and everything, million-dollar cars.

He said, 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 is what the other public cases want to appreciate about what you do at your website eric peters uh autos.com is that all the other sites what they do is they compare all these meaningless statistics about zero to 60 and all of the other metrics that they've come up with in the past few years, skid pad numbers or whatever. And it 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, you know, when you 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 that 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 affix 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 with regard to the government regulations 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, that 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 now we focus on the one thing that they're still allowed some latitude with, and that's horsepower and how quickly the thing can get to 60. And the problem with that is that, you know, once you get beyond that, it's very ephemeral.

You know, this car that I focused on in the article is the 1,000-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, a short of a Bugatti, the most powerful new, uh, high-performance car that you can get. Well, you know, somebody else is going to make one with 1200 horsepower and then there'll be 1500. 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 it, 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 i put some pictures with the article and look at earlier quarterbacks 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 60 and from 60 to zero numbers with the Corvette. I just looked at it. It's like, wow, that is just amazing. And the Stingray Corvette was my favorite one. And it was a small car, but both as a convertible and also as a fastback they were just amazing to look at

yeah absolutely gorgeous there's an analogy here that occurs to me too i'm an aviation fan and if you look at uh 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 have 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 that's why the new corvette looks like the new lamborghini which looks like the new ferrari which looks like the new whatever it's not they all have that same you know that same sort of angular insectoid look and motorcycles it's another one you know i 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 uh kawasaki's are green suzuki's are blue yamahas are yellow but you know i'm talking about hyper bikes here sport bikes which is the analysis of the supercars because you because 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 winnows down and dictates what type of shape you're going to have. So that's why they all look the same, irrespective of the brand. Well, at least they're doing them in different colors, because most of the cars are either

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's color this is it's not a black or white car and i forgot what it was but i don't like it but it's it's interesting that they have a different color you know this was inadvertent because you know 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 silver white you know this is these sort of generic uh milk box kind of kind of colors and i got to looking at some of the uh 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 in case i think it was a mini uh 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 i saw an article i forget which one there's probably several of them that are doing it now. You know, different functions on the cars. I think it was Audi or Mercedes, maybe BMW. It's a German car. And, you know, if you want this function that I would take for granted, you've got to pay an annual subscription rate to it. You know, and they're doing that now.

They're taking these different functions of the car and making them uh a subscription it's crazy sure yeah it's the netflix model at least when you pay 800 bucks for the different colored paint you actually own the paint i guess but you're right no it's bmw that you're thinking about they they and it was tesla that started this of course oh yeah tesla was the one that came up with this idea of 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 uh people discovered this because they would sell the car you know so the second owner of the tesla and he looks at the window sticker and it says that it comes with whatever the feature is i think it was in particular their uh their self-driving feature 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 a 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 seat heaters into all the cars. 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 pay a monthly fee that is a chintzy 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 gotta pay them to get the seat

heater to work i went when karen and i uh 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 starving. We couldn't afford to even eat. But we stayed in this one little beat-up place, this mini flatlet that was on the outskirts of London. It took almost an hour to get in. And they had, for the lights you had

to put in a coins you know there 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 chintzier and and stranger when you consider the price of a bmw i mean it's crazy 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 bed.

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 in because the lights were gone. The TV was gone. Everything just gets turned off in that uh in 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 are 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 was pioneered by our friend Bill Gates back in the 90s when he came up with the idea of instead of you buying the CD that had 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. So now you buy the license for the software and you

have to renew it. And if you don't renew it every so often, then it just stops working. So that the auto industry saw that and decided, ah, that's a great idea. We're we're going to start doing that too yeah in the mid-2000s i remember they started doing it with graphics programs and with 3d modelers and everything like that and it's like all of a sudden they're all doing it as an annual subscription of course it still is that way with adobe uh and and it was infuriating it really was uh talk about this 1978 mustang 2 oh yeah for 32 000 i thought that i saw that and i thought well i wonder how much my 1968 fastback would be if i started that because i thought the mustang 2s i didn't really care much for them but uh yeah it's amazing 32 000 for that but with some background uh not far from me is a really interesting dealer that specializes

uh 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 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 everything 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 32 000 price on a 78 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 it helped to save the Mustang, to be fair, because things were bad in the mid-70s. So Ford radically downsized it. They took a lot of Pinto components to make

this Mustang II, which was the first Mustang to come with a four-cylinder engine, and which eventually offered a V8 that, wait for it, made all of it 122 horsepower. 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 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 is creeping up because my god they're starting to look better and better all the time in the rear view mirror you know you look at this car it's like you know which would i rather have? This extremely low miles, pristine 78 Mustang II for $32,000,

or a new four-cylinder turbo Mustang with all kinds of multiplex touchscreens 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 Rover 2, even though its engine only makes about 130 horsepower. And in a weekend, I could put a four-barrel carburetor on it, a set of headers and a cam, and I could do that for less than $1,000 and double the horsepower. That's pretty appealing. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. You mentioned the Pinto. It's amazing. I didn't know the mustang 2 had pinto parts in it but yeah that the floor plans i think are pintos it was the only mustang to ever have i think i think it was the 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 a you know again in retrospect it was a it was more akin to the original 64 Mustang. The Mustang had gotten big, huge, and heavy by 1973, and it was kind of an overwhelming car. The original 64 Mustang was a light, small, nimble, agile car that appealed to anybody. It wasn't just hot rod types and young guys who liked the original Mustang. It was a car that a housewife could drive or an older person could drive and the mustang 2 that was made from 74 to 78 was very similar it was you know smart design it had a hatchback it was uh you know it was attention it was roomy for its size it was economical uh it was not a bad car you know even though at the time we all ridiculed it oh yeah yeah i remember um you know i i got my car um uh i guess it was uh 72 73 and i had a 68

mustang and i was looking at the new mustangs i was like those are horrible if i had the money i wouldn't want that it was so huge i i remember it from the bond movie uh uh diamonds are forever uh there was a scene where they're chasing where they're you know he's 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 uh were out of tampa where i lived uh they they called themselves the 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 although i'd seen that stunt so many times it was it was a lot of fun to see that stunt done in the film but they did it with one of those gigantic mustangs the 73 mustangs that were huge very impressive stuff yeah very impressive stuff huge yeah the pinto like i said karen had the pinto and uh the the it had it 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 and in leo coco's defense who at the time was the four vice president of uh north american operations that car was brought to market for just under $2,000 when it first came out. And like most of the economy cars at that time from American car

makers, it was rear wheel drive. Today, rear wheel drive is exclusively for affluent people because you can't find anything that's rear wheel drive anymore that isn't basically a luxury branded vehicle. So this is a measure again of what we've lost. You could get a Pinto with a rear wheel drive layout. And you remember when we were in high school people would put v8s in pintos and vegas and things like that and it was all kinds of fun yeah you can't do that anymore with with a little front wheel drive car that's right yeah it's too complicated yeah when you go back and you look at uh there's a company called flying miata they they put they they cram in really big engines up to v8 like a corvette v8 engine ls1 and and uh 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 miata it had a lot of electronics in it and then this uh fourth generation which just came out uh well i don't know maybe it's been about five or six years now. 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, a more robust transmission in it. It took them forever to do that because of all the electronics and how complicated. Very expensive. Yeah, everything now is an integrated system. It took them forever to do that because of all the electronics and how complicated. Very expensive. Yeah.

Everything now is an integrated system. So, you know, if you bought, for example, a 22 charger with the V6 engine that's standard in it, and you wanted to put the Hemi that you could have gotten in it, the V8 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 gut 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 my I have a 76 Trans Am as you know and I can put any engine I want to in there easily if i felt like it and and as long as it physically bolted up uh it will work and everything else in the car will continue to work because they're separate systems they're not interconnected systems oh yeah yeah everything was interconnected on it but getting back to the pinto thing you know again what you you began by

saying in terms of people being able to uh pick something that they can afford karen was just starting out as a teacher she She didn't have any money. She could get a used Pinto, and I think it was under $1,000. 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. Somebody stole that car, and people should.

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, and it was middle of the week. And I said, uh, 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, uh, to work and she could make it, you know, there in back by just topping it up because it was a slow leak and so she goes out uh in the morning to with her jug of water and her car's gone you know it's parked in front of the apartment she was renting and she called me up and she says

now you brought me home yesterday right she just couldn't believe that somebody would steal this car and they did steal the car and they had it for about 30 days but the insurance company uh paid her for it is because i imagine they ruined the engine uh probably ran it without any any water in it uh but uh they paid her the full amount and actually she made a little bit of money on the deal uh 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 who would steal that car you know but uh they take it for laugh about it now but you know and again here's here's another related thing you know housing to get back to that issue uh because of zoning laws uh 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 it's only for people who can afford a $400,000 or $500,000 mortgage. What happens to the people who maybe want to spend $100,000 because that's all they've got? Yeah, that's right. They're pushed out of the market effectively. And that's exactly the same thing that's happened with cars. And cars, I think, set the predicate for that. You know, in Raleigh,igh austin uh they just uh they've got a neighborhood

that they're doing 3d printed houses with concrete 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 uh they're extremely expensive houses and it's like you know when when is somebody going to address that lower end of the market i mean you've got a situation where there's not a lot of labor, and yet, you know, you're supposed to be able to save some money by having this 3D printed thing. It's like, what is the advantage of this thing if it's going to be expensive? And they've got an entire neighborhood of 3D printed houses, but they're extremely expensive. And I think they're more than, like, the medium price of the house. I don't know. It's difficult. Austin's kind of a strange market. It's been going up and and going down so i don't know really how it compares

but isn't it ironic when you think about it that we hear this endless prattle about democracy you know democracy is 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 and the effrontery of it because the people everything is dictated to us from the top down and and the effrontery of it because the people who are dictating it are extremely affluent people who can afford to buy anything and they're telling the people who don't have that much money and particularly young people who 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 too 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, monkeypox now, but the bird flu, the way they focused on it, you know, where they were killing, unnecessarily killing massive numbers of chickens in New Zealand. They did kind of the same thing with bees that produced manuka honey which is extremely expensive but then when it 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 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 the 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 refrain from outright outlawing things. What they do is they outprice 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, you can have a steak if you want to stay, if you can afford a steak and, you know, as they continue to jack the prices up, it's going to get to the point where almost nobody except the very affluent can afford a steak. You know, they're open about

it when they talk about this carbon credit thing, you know, that Elon Musk has taken advantage of, 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 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 really working overtime 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

they're the king of the world you know they're the pope that you're buying indulgence from them because they're the king of the world you know they're the pope that you're buying indulgence from to to pollute 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 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 And 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's shutting down scientists who are doing control studies and have done control studies.

This one institution did them as early as 2007, but I had one that went back to 2002 where they were talking about the fact that masks don't work for any of this stuff. They've 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 know, 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 adroit and it's really vicious. And I hope to God we can figure out a way to combat this because if not the 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 vasque and the vaccines they know people know they don't protect so you got to wear one and it's like what what difference does that make it's absolutely insane uh but let me ask you about this because you mentioned there's a a place that has some unusual cars down not too far away from you um is that where you saw this um right hand drive um uh to 91 land cruiser 70 yeah yeah that's a very interesting article and i'm interested to know if you've made a decision yet tell people the prepper's dilemma tell them what your problem was about this i am contemplating violating my own prime directive which 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 20 years have bought a thing that i could not afford to pay for to the extent possible. I never, for the past 20 years, have bought a thing that I could not afford to pay for at the time that I purchased it because 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 neat JDM right- right hand drive export only models that you couldn't have gotten in the united states thanks to uncle sam uh it is a 91 toyota land cruiser uh which is which is powered by a mechanically injected diesel engine with no turbo that has manual four-wheel

drive a manual transmission analog everything there's nothing electronic about it you don't even need a battery to start the thing if you've got a hill. Just roll it down a hill and it'll start and run. It doesn't need anything. And I thought to myself, wow, that might be a really great thing to have in the months and years ahead potentially. So I can't afford to cut a check for it, but I've been thinking about, well, maybe just this once I should take on a little debt to get something like that, because, you know, it really could be the difference between being able to 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 to be. They don't have particulate traps. 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 operate your vehicle.

And that makes it a very viable vehicle to me, to my way of thinking. So I haven't come to a decision yet, but I'm definitely brooding it about in my head. So you haven't come to decision yet i saw the article and um i guess it's a couple of days old and uh you are asking um uh the readers to uh to chime in on this and let you know i mean what are you taking a poll is that what it is yeah because i've got i've got one of the things that 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 comment. And I learn a lot from the people who do. And I take their advice on a lot of things.

And it was interesting because people fell on either side of that dividing line. Some said, yeah, this is something that's justifiable. This is something that makes sense. And others said, don't do it. 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 uh i see you you see me talking about the ford patent which you and i have talked about this for the longest time uh 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 uh on your phone the map app you know that it knows what the speed limit is wherever you are

and uh 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 we should have filed that, people have filed ideas for, you know, there was a patent for 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 happening.

The problem is we both have a conscience for all of our defects yeah yeah this is this is really Orwellian uh though entirely predictable Ford had filed the patent for basically an elaboration of technology that already exists and of course they claim it's only for law enforcement purposes but essentially the one use the tech that's already embedded in practically every vehicle that's been made since roughly about 2015 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 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 said, 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. 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 uh 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, 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, 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 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 20 years or so and now you can see the picture and it's almost there it's almost become completely coalesced 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 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. It 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. car and i might be spied on and data mined by my car yeah but the problem is you know you can 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 uh invasion of the body by fisher snatchers you know you know there are always ways to get around that and i you know and i'm sure you probably agree with me you tell me normally 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 yeah but there comes a point when the system itself becomes an outlaw that your only option is to become an outlaw too and and to stop playing along with these games that they play so uh 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,

I went off-road a little bit, and they can't see what your number is. Do all of these things. There's nothing immoral about it. When the system is immoral, you have a right to defend yourself against it. Oh, yeah. We thought about that and came to our own conclusions about that 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 uh four years ago when they're talking about vaccine passports and all the rest of this stuff and it's like uh 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 uh you know it is they'd like to put this guilt trip on you you need to do this to save grandma do 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 um active nullification of what they're doing i absolutely agree with you i think what they're doing is is really

you know turning every new car into some kind of a stasi snitch uh to try to you know uh to to surveil us it's 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's 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 uh everything that everybody's going to do everywhere that so they got cameras everywhere and now they they think well where else could we put a camera and it never ends they can always never end the other facet of it is that there's this underlying 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 deserve uh whatever punishment they they decide to levy against you it's an it's it's really a a hideous kind of psychology behind it you know and americans used to have an instinctive dislike of busybodyism you know they used to not like the the nosy neighbor who peered through the blinds you know to see what you were doing in the backyard the glad now america has been undefined by busybodyism you know and of, people have been conditioned to that. For 20 years now, back during the reign of George W. Bush, I always refer to him as the chimp because he's a simian imbecile. Forgive my language for it.

But you remember, if you see something, say something. I mean, it was right out of East Germany. It was so profoundly un-American 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 are they doing? It looks suspicious. I better call the cops. Yeah. Just mind your own business and leave other people alone. Oh, yeah. Look at Tim Walsh during the during the lockdown stuff. He had a snitch line, you know, hotline to snitch on other people that had 10,000 calls that were made to it. So they had people in Minnesota that were taking up taking him up on it take a look at the threats

from this uh bureaucrat in 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 i call him his name is theory breton i call him conspiracy theory breton the guy was actually uh his dad was a bureaucrat so i call him an sob 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 uh our political candidates in our election don't have the ability to speak and to debate things i mean and it's to me the most amazing thing about um about this trump musk thing people are you know on both sides of political divide uh 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 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 ascribe what's going on to, 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 people. 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 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 of his hurt feelings he's a man and it's it's it's just you can't change biology by putting on different clothes you know and and to say something like that now they characterize that as hate speech and you know that issue is ought to be extremely alarming when the truth when facts become hateful you have a real problem yeah that's right yeah i i always refer back to uh remember the goldwater slogan uh kind of a paraphrase of that yeah i'd say extremism in defense of free speech is no vice and moderation of content is no virtue because it's always done to show those feelings you know it's ridiculous uh when when you look at this, and this is one of the justifications that SOB Breton had, and that was we've got to look at anything that is hateful.

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 say anything that hurts somebody's feelings. And it's like, wow, you've just rolled together two of the Orwells in ministries under one thing. It's to me just such a self-evident thing that free speech, the truth has nothing to fear from free speech. If something is false, it will be established that it's false pretty readily.

You know, this suppression of free speech has one objective, and that is to stifle the truth and facts that are uncomfortable with 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 2020. What they did was they used 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 uh that kind of psychological gaslighting that they were able to pull on people creating fear distrust uh snitching and all the rest that was done because of mass violations of the first amendment and and so it really is the paramount one i believe i think if ultimately implicitly if you are not free to speak you're not free to think that's right that's that's the bottom line and once you're not free to think and to hold true to your own convictions in your own conscience and what you think is correct and right you have no freedom everything else is meaningless

that's right yeah yesterday i was talking a little bit about this new platform called Noster that Tom, that Dorsey, what's his name? Jack Dorsey. That, you know, he's thrown his weight behind and 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 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 was the targeting of the way that we think and that behavioral manipulation that is there. That used a violation of the First Amendment to do that. 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've only got about a minute and a half here. Okay. So, you know, what else is happening? How we've only got about uh a minute and a half here um okay so so uh you know what what about my interview how about my interview with the parasite did you catch that one yes yes that's right i saw that the uh the property taxes because you talk about not owning

anything as long as you got property taxes as everybody's pointed out you really don't own your home right yeah well i 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 property. And I just, I got to thinking about the Asusian way that most Americans just accept the idea that some government guy can show up at 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. You know, I ran 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? That 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 idea that you will never own your home, that you have to pay rent to the government forever until you're dead. And no politicians will talk about that. It is really amazing that they won't even they won't even talk about that. It is really amazing that 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, 1% of the value of the home. It absolutely is insidious.

Eric Peters, ericpetersautos.com. Thank you so much for joining us, Eric. Always a great day. Always have a great time. Thank you. Thank you. Have a good day. And thank you, folks, for listening.

That's the end of the show. Thank you. Thank you. Have a good day. And thank you folks for listening. That's the end of the show. Thank you. Let me tell you the David Knight show you can listen to with your ears. You can even watch it by using your eyes. In fact, if you can hear me, that means you're listening to The David Knight Show right now. Yeah, good job. And you want to know something else? You can find all the links to everywhere to watch or listen to the show at thedavidknightshow.com. That's a website.