The David Knight Show - Technocrats Are Turning Cars Into Prisons

Episode Date: December 3, 2025

Eric Peters joins to explain how the war on cars, from CAFE mandates and the EPA to “safety” tech and telematics, is pricing normal people off the road and turning vehicles into trackable appliances only the elite can afford. Money should have intrinsic value AND transactional privacy: Go to https://davidknight.gold/ for great deals on physical gold/silver For 10% off Gerald Celente's prescient Trends Journal, go to https://trendsjournal.com/ and enter the code KNIGHT Find out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.com If you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-showOr you can send a donation throughMail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @[e-mail] App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.

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That's gofundme.com. Gofundme.com. Joining us now, and it's always a pleasure to have Eric on. It's been too long since we talked, Eric Peters of Eric Petersotos.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 a mobility as being able to use a car to go where I want, when I want, and not have to follow a schedule from some mass

transportation thing or get into a car that's owned by these corporate conglomerates. But thank you for joining us, Eric. Oh, thank you, David. I always enjoy being here. And by the way, whenever I hear that word mobility, I almost think of people in wheelchairs. I'm a hard guy. I like, well, I enjoy driving. Well, 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 40 years, you know, when I was in high school, most guys loved cars, and a lot of girls liked cars too. That's 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 having to uh 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 yeah 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 to say, when I was younger, people would say, somebody say, well, can't do this? And it's like, hey, it's a free country. You don't hear anybody say that anymore, do you? No, I don't think I've heard anybody say that since probably 9-11. That's right. It's 25 years now. But that's, you know, at least that's a sign of psychological health. At least people aren't so deluded as to think that we still live in a free country.

That's right. But they are deluded enough to think that they should make a federal case out of everything. That was the other thing. Hey, don't make a federal case out of it, you know, if somebody's making a big deal out of it. 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 on the U.K., they came the same conclusions that Strauss and Howe did, about the fourth turning. They went back 5,000 years of history. One of the things they said was, you know, the corruption and the decay and institutions, but also people start getting very messianic about their leaders. And I thought, yeah, that's what I see all the time about Maga. You know, it's got to be Trump. He's got some special mission from God. You know, he's specially

anointed and all the rest of this stuff. It is truly amazing. They're so desperate for a Messiah that they'll even project that onto somebody like Donald Trump. It's crazy. It's sometimes it's jaw-dropping. I'm a professional writer, so usually I'm not at a loss for words. But when it comes to Trump, I often find my jaw hitting the floor, my eyes boggle like Cash Patel. And I, what am I going to even say about this stuff? That's right.

It truly is amazing. Well, you told me when we were just connected, and you said there's some interesting news about Miata that I don't think I'm going to like. What is that news? well just some background the miata's been around since 1989 they introduced it as a 90 model and it has been for many decades one of the most successful models that masda has ever brought out because anybody who's driven one will tell you it's it's just it is one of the the most enjoyable fun cars that you can possibly get and drive the problem is that it's gotten to be pretty

expensive the current model 2025 the base price is nearly 30,000 dollars to put that in some perspective back in 1990, it was just over $13,000. Wow. Now, granted, some of that is inflation, and some of that, of course, are what I call compliance costs, you know, having to have multiple airbags in the things and all of the other stuff that's been added to vehicles that has been raising the cost. People talk about inflation, and of course, that's true, but the thing that's important to understand is that people's earning power hasn't tracked with the devaluation of buying power. That's really what inflation is. So back in 1990, regular Americans could afford to have two cars or even more.

They could afford to have the fun car. They get the Miata as the weekend car, the track car, the fun day car, right? Summer car, yeah, yeah. But they also had, you know, you got to have something that has more than two doors and more than two seats if you've got kids. You'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 who can still afford a $30,000 fund car like a Miata and a $30,000 crossover on top of that and the cost of insurance and everything else that goes along with it. So what are they doing? Well, when you're faced with the choice between the practical and the fun, most people are going to have to pick the practical. That's just the way life is. So it's not that the Miata has lost its appeal.

The problem is that there are not enough people anymore who can afford it to sustain the car as a viable enterprise for Mazda. And so apparently, that's why they're thinking about canceling it. Wow. Well, I got mine. Yeah. As long as the government doesn't find some way to declare it illegal on the streets, I'm okay with it. I do have mine. And from a practical standpoint, there's this, Eric, groceries have gotten so expensive that about all we can fit in the car will fit in the back of the yacht trunk, right?

It'll accommodate your 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. 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, 2016, so it's getting a little old, you know, in terms of product cycles. And 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. Now you may have noticed if you look at the new car landscape, practically everything is hybrid now, you know, to some degree or another. It's either a mild hybrid or a full hybrid or something. And the reason for that, of course, has to do with the federal government continuing to require ever stricter mileage and so-called emission standards, which chiefly means carbon dioxide, that awful gas that plants have used to metabolize and produce oxygen for us so that we breathe. Trump, by the way, today is supposedly going to make an announcement about CAFE, the corporate average fuel economy. standards. And we'll see whether it's any meaningful reduction or simply to kind of riff on Orwell's 1984. Remember when the, when the people were so happy because Big Brother had decided to increase the Chaco oration when in fact, of course, it had been decreased. So, you know,

what they had been hinting at was that they were going to just roll them back or keep them at where they were in 2020. Well, the reason everything's being hybridized right now is precisely because the only way to comply with the 2020 standards was to build these hybrids. which cycle the engine off as often as possible and put smaller and smaller engines in cars. It's the only way that they can achieve compliance with these federal dictates. So unless we see them actually rolled back significantly or better yet eliminated altogether, I think we're going to see more and more hybrids and we're also going to see fewer and fewer interesting cars like the Miata available for people. Well, in terms of what Trump is doing, anything less than a complete shutdown of the cafe regime is not.

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 EPA needs to be shut down. I mean, let's not just stop with a cafe. rules. Let's get rid of the EPA and let's get rid of this finding that they can 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.com article. And it's absolutely true. They ignore the pollution from the EVs. But I think the biggest glaring hypocrisy with all of this has in the past been that they would ignore the two biggest polluters on earth, China and India. They could make as many power plants as they wanted to and continue to make them, put no cleaning devices on them whatsoever, and this was supposed to address a global issue. Well, how does that address a global issue? It's nonsense.

But now we've had this kind of come home in the sense of the AI data centers. They want to put these AI data centers out there. So they're obviously not interested in 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 how it's real hypocrisy. It's not a real problem. It certainly is not existential. And it is, if it's in their advantage to do it, and it is in their advantage for the AI stuff, because that's all about surveillance and control. That is the killer app. And so they're going to do whatever they have to take. And they don't care if we own anything. They don't

care if we're able to go anywhere and they don't care if we've got any electricity you know you and i have said that for the longest time you know they they don't even want us to have electric vehicles they don't want us to have electricity uh nevertheless you know own a car so that's where this stuff is all going but you know when you talk about the miata that is such a perversion of the whole idea the whole idea of the miata was to make it incredibly light and simple and so a lot of times you know people are talking about modifying the miadas i mean there's a company called flying Miata and and it's kind of interesting what they do with it since it's such a lightweight car um they would uh shove in a v8 engine into the miata and um uh i would read with curiosity

about it but it was something that i never wanted because then you got to get this heavy transmission and that was one of the nice things about the miata was um how uh how it shifted and uh very responsive and and how it could turn on a dime and it was all really about being a momentum car rather than a zero to 60 car, right? And so if these people are going to put in there the, you know, all the added weight and all the rest of the stuff to make it a hybrid, 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 cars, sold well, and turn the thing into an EV, and not only an EV, an EV with a base price that was $20,000 higher than the previous 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 Jeep so much that nobody can, their market can't afford it. People wanted something that was rugged and affordable. And that's the same kind of thing they're doing to the Miata. They don't, they don't want to, everybody wants to make exactly the same car. And they all want to upscale everything because they understand how expensive cars are getting. And they know that only the really rich can't afford this stuff. So it's going to become a play thing for the rich.

It probably, I don't know if it'll be in my lifetime because I'm getting at the end of it. But probably in your lifetime, you'll probably see the idea that, you know, owning a car is like having a private plane today, you know. Oh, sure. It's going to be a reversion to the early days of the car industry, the car world. If you went back to say about 1905 or so, the only people who owned a car were extremely wealthy people. You know, go watch episodes of Downton Abbey, you know, the BBC show about that era.

Or Toad of Toad Hall, right? Yes. Because at that time. He could afford a car and he didn't really care what the fines were like. He was very much like Elon Musk who owes him. He opened up his, he opened up a couple of businesses there, not too far from where we used to live in Texas. He had boring and he had, I think it was, I can't remember, maybe it was SpaceX or something, but it was not, it didn't have anything to do with the launching thing.

And he was violating all kinds of rules from the Department of Transportation as well as dumping wastewater directly into the Colorado River. He didn't care. They kept fining him and they gave him the maximum amounts of fines and he didn't care. So they said, well, we need to. to raise the fines up. It's like, well, you know, they raise the fines up. It's going to be applied against people who can't afford it. And you're not going to be able to raise the fine up high enough to affect Elon Musk under any circumstances. So he's kind of like Toad of Toad Hall,

you know. Right. You know, here's something to kind of explain the point to people who may not be familiar with the history of it. It used to be that when you opened the door of a General Motors vehicle, you would see this little badge on the sill and it would say body by Fisher. Yeah. Do you remember that? Oh, yeah. And that, that is something. that harkens back to the days of what we're called coach-built cars before the model t this is around the turn of the last century or 1900 or so if you wanted a car you went to a coach builder and they would you would specify what you wanted and it was all custom everything was made to order and obviously only very wealthy people could afford a vehicle like that so it's a rich man's toy and you know

henry forward came along and had the affront street 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. Yeah. You know, and for a 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 vehicles were luxury items that only the very affluent people in society could afford.

It's really despicable. And I wanted to mention something else to get back to what you were mentioning before about the whole emissions 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, the Micromicolina? It's cute as a button.

It's like, bootros, bootro's galley. It's so nice that they named it twice, right? Well, what it basically is, is a small electric car that's essentially, it looks just like the old BMW iseta. Do you remember the Iceda? Was that the one that opened in the front? Yes, exactly. 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 $16,000. Why can't we have that? Wow. You know, I attack electric cars all the time, but fundamentally what I'm attacking is the way they're being forced on people and the way alternatives are being taken away from people, not the EV as such.

I really don't have a problem with, you know, why can't people buy a $16,000 basic car if they don't need ludicrous speed, They don't need to go on the highway for several hundred miles. And the point is, like, if it truly is the case that we're facing this existential threat, the climate is changing. You know, we're all going to die unless we don't drive electric cars. Well, why wouldn't they want to encourage these affordable little electric cars that people could actually buy as opposed to these elitist cars, these EVs that, you know, we're allowed to buy 50,000, $60,000 electric cars, but we can't buy the little $16,000 electric car that you can buy in Europe. It just speaks to the disingenuousness of the narrative, the way they're trying to tell you that, you know, you have to make this transition because if you don't, we're all going to die in the climate catastrophe. Well, it's nonsense. If that were true, they'd be doing everything conceivable to encourage these low-cost, efficient, simple little cars.

That's right. It's just like the pandemic. If they really believe 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 things like that, and I remember there was also the Messerschmitt. Do you remember that? That was featured in Brazil. That was the car that the character drove in that. I've never seen one of those in person, but I have set in the BMW Izzetta. I've said in that thing.

But, you know, these things are basically golf carts. Just own it. Well, sure, but why not? The full vibe, you know? Why not? You know, I mean, back when I was in college, I drove a 74 beetle. Love the car. But really, it wasn't much more than a golf cart.

You know, it's right. It had trouble maintaining 65 miles an hour on anything, you know, that was at all inclined. That was pretty much, it's top speed, you know, if you had a downhill stretch and the wind was at your back, you might be able to get up to about 75 miles an hour in a beetle. It was fine. It was cheap. It allowed me to get on wheels, you know, so that I didn't have to walk or. take a bus. And that's why I'm kind of so annoyed about the fact that you can't buy new vehicles like that little inexpensive EV that's available in Europe, because after all, if that thing

were on the market as a used vehicle, it would probably cost only $7,000 or $8,000, you know, after a couple of years of depreciation. And imagine, you know, you're an 18-year-old kid and, you know, you don't have a lot of money, but you'd like to have a car. So, you know, here's a car that you could, that would work as your first car. And my point is, you know, we're being denied all these alternatives. It's no longer the case that the market responds to what people want. It's what the government demands and it's one size fits all. And that's why, you know, you hear everybody complaining about, oh, they all look the same. Well, there's a reason for that. The reason they all look the same is because they all have to comply with the same government

demands. That's right. Yeah, you remember, I grew up in Florida and so the Volkswagen that I aspired to have was the dune buggy. I didn't care if that was practical or not. And then really doubled down with a Thomas Crown affair that had Steve McQueen driving one of those. Remember that? I forget what the company was that put those in. We just called them. Yeah, the man. That's all right. The manks. And we just called them dune buggies for that. But Karen's first car was a pinto. And that was another example. I remember you talk about how that was your right of passage. That was how you knew you were an adult and how you now had freedom. It was having the wheels, right? And so I remember scrutinizing the stuff and figuring out how much I would have to work in order to save up and buy a pinto before, you know, I was able to drive because they were very cheap.

I remember they were, you know, $1,400 or something new. It was incredible how cheap they were. Of course, the dollar was, I had a lot more purchasing power than it has now. But, you know, Karen got one of those. It had rubber mats, you know, not carpet, of course, hand cranked windows and all. kind of stuff. The trunk was so thin that when you drop the trunk, it didn't have a hatchback on hers, but it had a little small trunk that was maybe about a foot wide

for it deep, you know, and when you dropped it, it just shook. It was such thin metal. And of course, you know, they were infamous for exploding when they were hit in the back, but they cut every corner that they cut, including the safety equipment to keep it from exploding when it was hit in the back. But it was what she needed and she was able to get one used and um 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 was that but she had a slow leak in her radiator and uh i was going to fix it over the weekend but it was like Thursday she she goes out to get

into 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 um the car was gone She called me up and she said, you didn't bring me home last night, right? I drove home last night. He's like, yeah, that's right. She goes, my car has gone. It took us a while to actually pinch ourselves and to wake ourselves to the fact that somebody had stolen the thing.

He was like, who would steal this? And everybody joked 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 Coco, who was at Ford at the time, and who was responsible for the Pinto,

decreed that it would be kept under $2,000 brand new. And they managed to do that. Think about that. Imagine that. A brand new car, now granted inflation and everything, but still $2,000 for a brand new car, meaning that five or six years down the road, cars like that were abundant on the used car market for kids who didn't have a lot of money. I mean, just like you, when I was that age, when I was in high school, I saved the money that I earned from cut and grass and shoveling snow and all that other stuff

and 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. If you can only go wherever the bus goes or the train goes, that means you can only get certain kinds of jobs. And it probably means you're going to have to live in an urban area. But guess what? Everything's more expensive in the urban area than it is farther out. So really, it's a kind of an assault on the, you know,

as it's ironic, isn't it? You know, we've heard from the Democrats in the left for years about the plate 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 metastatic. And it's beginning to make it very difficult for middle class people to achieve, to have the standard of living that so-called working class people had 50 years ago. I agree. Yeah. And it's like, what are they, what is their end game with all this stuff, right? Is it just to kill us all? Or what is it? Because it doesn't make any sense that they keep taking everything away from everybody. They want to take away our jobs and so forth and put us on universal basic income. You know, what is the end game with that? It is so antithetical to what? Henry Ford was about, as he said, you know, we're going to make the cars cheap enough that the people who work on the assembly line manufacture them can afford to have one. And so, you know, what is the end game for the people? They really do hate us. It's this concentration. And that was the other aspect that these people noticed going back over 5,000 years. The frustration and the lack of the sense of control of your own life, no opportunity and all the rest of this stuff, which is precisely what the agenda is.

is for the technocracy and the people who are around Trump that, you know, Peter Thiel and these Curtis Yarbon 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 time, but I don't think it was going to last.

Yeah, psychologically, it's very interesting. And I think part of it is kind of a pathological thing. And that some people, it's not enough to have generational wealth, you know, to have enough money not only for themselves to live without any care whatsoever about financial worries. Their kids and their kids' kids are going to be completely taken care of. It's never enough. How many billions do you need? Elon Musk's net worth is what, $60 billion or something crazy like that?

I think it's more than that. And it's still not enough. They need more. You know, it's not enough to have a yacht. you have to have two yachts, then you have to have a private jet, then you have to have four. The biggest shot. You've got to have the bigger than the billionaire next door. Yeah. And so that, it's almost as if there's an element of sadism in it. It's not that, oh, I've got something really nice. I've got, you know, I've got a Daimler Mayback. But my neighbor, my God, that guy has a Chevy suburban. The guy down, you know, the guy who cuts some grass has a Chevy suburban. I don't want him to have that.

Yeah. That's somehow a diminishment. That, you know, I feel, it's only, it's only, I only, I only feel good. But 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. I mean, it's one of the reasons why they buy things like a Mayback, because I'm the only one who's got a Mayback, right? Or they buy a dress or a purse that costs $4,000 or $8,000 or something, you know, it's that

exclusivity. And then there's only so far that you can go with that exclusivity until it's necessary for you to exclude stuff from other people. And that's really where this is all. headed. I agree. It is really a kind of a sickness that's there. But we've always seen that. It's an addiction that these people have to money, right? The love of money, it becomes like a drug to them. It really does. There's another interesting aspect of this, if I, 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're acquiring their wealth 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. That was more than a decade ago when we first talked about that. And that, as you pointed out, was how he got his wealth. I said that earlier in the program. I said, you know, you look at this. And so many times you see people who are libertarian or conservative,

and they want to champion businesses and say, business can do nothing wrong and government can do nothing right. And then the Democrats are the other way, right? government can do nothing wrong businesses and private companies can do nothing right the reality is that they've merged and that's what so makes it all so evil and and they don't see that you know they 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 with trump you know he's

using, taking over, buying a share of Intel and using government money to start, you know, acquiring assets to own it. I mean, that is socialism, Marxism, central planning, all the things that Republicans used to oppose, they now applaud because Trump is doing it. Yep, they've so poisoned the well. And in addition to that, younger Americans in particular don't know their own history. That's right. Henry Ford can be considered a capitalist. Henry Ford figured out a way to make a better mousetrap. And he didn't use the government at all to subsidize his business. What he did was to make a product that people could afford. And a very interesting thing about Ford was that the Model T got progressively less expensive with each model year because

he would fine tune it, figure out ways to make it cost less, and he was able to scale things up and he sold more of them so he could make more on volume than on individual unit sales. Yeah. You know, it was such a boon for average people because it liberated them. from the yoke of having to be tied to an urban area to a city. A farmer could buy a Ford Model T, and he could use it as a tractor. 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 were by circumstances and and you know the 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 lift 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 we look at the we look at lift and you look at uber you know they

were all about owning all of the transportation privately right and making it kind of a a fascist run system, not directly owned by the government as if they would own all the buses and the rails and subway like that, but the fact that they would partner with government to make sure, you know, they do whatever government wants them to do. If the government tells them that David Knight can't ride anywhere, they would enforce that for them. And so they're all about that and that kind of a partnership that we see there. And they're all about getting rid of, as Travis Kalalnik of Uber used to say, the reason

our rides are expensive is because that other dude in the car. We're going to get rid of that other dude in the car. We're going to have self-driving cars. That's where we want to go. So who's going to be able to afford to driving these things, right? Because it's not just one sector with artificial intelligence or robotics and everything. They're going for every sector all at once. They're trying to reduce. There's an MIT report saying that they could get rid of, I forget how many tens of millions of jobs. But it was massive. It was like maybe 20 million jobs or something. We think we can replace 20 million jobs right now with AI if we get really serious about this.

We build the data centers. Well, they love to do that because it will increase their profit margin will reduce their health care costs. You mentioned how this guy, the Lyft guy, says that cities are bad. Cities 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, you know, in them, and doesn't even appreciate that other people might have a different point of view.

And if they have a different point of view, you know, theirs should be stomped. Yeah, they shouldn't be allowed to have their different point of view. That's the, the, that's the mentality of the people that we're dealing with. They can't live and let live. They can't say, okay, I've got a point of view. I like living in an urban hive. I like living in an apartment. You go ahead and live in the country.

You have a ability if you want to. They can't do that. That whole American idea that we used to have of live and let live, different strokes for different folks. It's just being exterminated by this arrogant, one-size-fits-all. Everybody's going to do the same thing mentality. I agree. Yeah, I like EVs. So you're going to use an EV, right?

I'm going to demand that you use it. There's not going to be any other exception. Yeah, I've got a couple of comments here. Birdhouse Blue says, I don't even recognize the cars today. They all look the same. That's absolutely right. And that's not by accident. You know, the reason that we 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. You know, it's kind of like the best way to understand it. If you follow Cop Racing, they literally have this template. It's this thing that they put over the body of the car. The car has to be within those parameters in order to be legal to use on the track. So that's why the NASCAR cars all look the same, no matter whether it's. says Toyota or Ford or whatever.

They all look the same. And that's the reason why when you go to a car showroom, pretty much all the cars look like they got stamped out of the same factory and a different badge got put on the fender. Yeah. Yeah, he also has a comment. He says, cars used to have character. You know, you're talking about that.

That reminds me of the Superbird. And I think it was Richard Petty. They did that. Remember that? And they actually sold that for consumers. I had a friend of mine in high school. His dad bought him a roadrunner superbird and had that long extension on the front and it had like the spoiler on the back that was like five feet

above the trunk and everything it was crazy that he was driving this around on the road but he could do it you know and it was a 200 mile an hour car yeah yeah and the really cool thing about stock car racing and those things that they literally were stock cars in the sense that they took a production car you know and they they turned it into a race car now the cars that you see on a NASCAR circuit they're all the same tube frame chassis underneath with us with this skin on the top that's supposed to vaguely kind of remind you of a Ford or a or it's not anything at all remotely like a car that you can buy at at the dealership whereas back in the day like your friend did you could buy basically Richard Petty's car yeah to the version of Richard Petty's car

and that's what crazy is funny you know they used to say you know went on Sunday so on Monday and it was true because you know you went to the race yeah and if you were a Chevy guy and you watch the Chevy win the race or a Dodge guy whatever you were happy about that and you wanted to be associated with that. So you went and bought that car because you thought it was a winner because it won the race. And there was truth in that. Yeah. Now, you know, motorsports, at least as far as NASCAR goes, I know I'm going to get some hate for this.

But I consider it to be the World Wrestling Federation of Motorsports. That's a good way to put it. That's funny. Well, I tell you, every time I see John in his car, you know, he was really a 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. It's like, yeah, my dad bought it for me.

But it was so out of character. It was amazing. Those cars, those, those, those, those Daytona Superbirds. Yeah. Those cars now are hundreds of thousands of dollars if you want to buy one now. Back at the day, when they were available, the dealers, they couldn't sell them. A lot of times they would sit on the lot and, you know, they would eventually get fire sold to somebody for a budget price because like your friend, people felt a little awkward driving around in this thing with this huge wing on the back, you know, and that bullet nose that it had on the front. Yeah.

Yeah, extended it. It's like, yeah, how are you going to park that anywhere? I assume that you didn't use that for your parallel parking driving test. It never fit in the parking space. It was crazy. And it was always a lot of fun to see him. And I hope he didn't wreck it. Maybe if he kept it, he's got a lot of money now he could get for that.

But, yeah, as Burthouse Blue also says, I used to buy many used cars for 500 or less back in the 80s even. That's true. You know, but let's talk a little bit about, you got an article. just came out this week, a solution for a created problem. Tell us about that. Oh, yeah. Well, we all have experienced the frustration of sitting at a traffic light and the light in front of us goes green. And as soon as you cross the intersection up ahead, there's another light and it just went red. Oh, yeah. And so, you know, signal timing. It's a problem. But it's a problem that's easily remedied by timing the signals. So that generally speaking on a given stretch of road,

most of the lights will go green sequentially in order so that the traffic can flow. Well, Instead of just doing it the simple way, now, one of these tech bro companies associated with the University of Michigan has proposed the fine idea of collating and collecting data being transmitted from your car, your GPS data and other data, so that the system recognizes how many cars are on a given stretch of rotor at a given time, how fast they're moving, and they can use AI to coordinate the lights. Of course, really what this is about, again, is monitoring you, collecting data about you. They swear up and down on a stack of Brave New Worlds that it's anonymized data, but of course it's not. It's only anonymized because they choose it to be anonymized. All of this is tied particularly to your car. People don't realize most people don't know that pretty much all cars now, made within the last 10 or 15 years, have what they call telematics, which means that they are constantly in communication with the hive.

I call it the hive. They're receiving updates. They're transmitting this. And you have no consent and no ability to. for that. And it's quite remarkable that there hasn't been more outrage, as far as 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, i.e. change it, or that it can use this device to track my movements, not because I'm

a criminal, because I have, I don't want people knowing where I'm going. That's reasonable. You know, I don't feel like I ought to have an ankle bracelet on unless I've actually been convicted of a crime. That's right. You know, there was an interesting thing reported on the last couple of weeks, and there was a guy who was pushing back against a bunch of statists who were pushing for some new safety devices or something to be made mandatory on cars. And this is a guy who, before he became a politician, he used to sell cars. And so he decided he would go around and see if these people actually had bought these safety devices that were optioned. on their car so he went around and got their VIN 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 VIN number and look this stuff up you violated my privacy and I thought 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 readings and not just the license plate

but they are creating an ID profile of your car looking at the idiosyncrasies of it does it have a dent on the side or a scratch or this or that and tracking that literally tracking it for law enforcement all the time and doing that as a contract and that is exploding that's a kind of you know public private tyranny that we see over and over again and um i thought it was just the most amazing i played that clip this a couple of weeks a in the last couple of weeks and uh the attitude of these people how dare you do this when they are mandating stuff for people and they are spying on people all the time yeah it's really interesting to me that you know this gets 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? Well, it's because they want it. And then the question is beg, well, why do they want it? And I think the reason is because there's just

gradually piece by piece, putting together this system in which you will have no control over your car beyond which, beyond what they want you to have. So the minute that you go outside the parameters of that, you know, the car will correct you. And it may get to the point where it's a shuts off, or it doesn't operate at all if you don't operate it within the allowable parameters. And at that point, we might as well just all sign up for a Johnny Cab, which is ultimately, I think, what they really do want. It is. It is. And that's why these car companies have been partnerships, in a partnership with government, to add all these expensive add-ons and all these things that people don't want, because that drives the price of the

car up, and they can charge people for that. And, but the problem is, is that they've kind of, you one thing that Vladimir Lennon got right was he said the capitalist will sell the rope that's used to hang them. And that's what's being used to hang these guys now is, you know, they've sold all these safety device ropes to rope you in. And now their cars are so expensive, people can't afford it. But then, of course, the solution to that is to get even more into a relationship and a partnership with the government so that they are the providers with this mobility stuff that's going to be. privately owned, but will be heavily controlled, and the government will tell them what to do. And, of course, you'll have the politicians who will get to wet their beak. As the mafia, people say, that's basically how this is going to operate.

It's going to be a Chinese model. That's why they opened up China for this type of stuff. Inevitably, to speak to your point about not seeing their own self-interest, there will have to be a winnowing of the number of manufacturers because it just doesn't make sense to have as many manufacturers as there still are producing essentially the same thing. Why not consolidate everything, kind of like they did in the Soviet Union, where you could get a lot of maybe after, you know, after 15 or 20 years on a waiting list, it's going to be, or Trubant, you know, those were your choices back in the old Soviet days.

And ultimately, I see something like that happening. You know, Philip Dick, the great sci-fi writer foresaw this. If you read his novel, Blade Runner, they don't get into it. Or the novel is Do 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 Turrell Corporation. Everything. It's sort of like, you know, the Amazon of our time, it's just this, every single consumer

good is made and manufactured by this one pyramidal structured, massive corporation that controls everything. You know, and he wrote that book decades and decades and decades ago, and here we are. You know, it's very prescient in the way it foresaw, you know, what corporatism would turn capitalism into. All these dystopian novels have begun. become a manual for these people, I think. Yeah, you talk about how you'd wait for decades for that.

That was one of the best Ronald Reagan jokes, basically in Russia, right? The guy orders, I don't know if there's a car, let's just say it's a washing machine. And he goes, we'll have that for you in 10 years. And the guy says, afternoon or morning? And he says, why do you ask? It's 10 years from now. He goes, well, because I've got the dishwasher coming in the morning 10 years from now. it's funny but it's sad yeah because those who can remember the way america used to be you know

never thought america would become like the soviet union that's right and yet we're rapidly on our way to becoming exactly that well you know it's even to the extent that you've got a lot of these uh conservative influencers uh and again these are not people who uh are researchers are not reporters and not journalists, they are influencers. That ought to tell you something. But they're out there trying to rehabilitate Richard Nixon, of all people, our 55-mile-an-hour guy who created the EPA and so many other issues out there. And he opened us up to China and he set us down on this path.

And I said, you know, think about it, conservatives. If you like Richard Nixon, you got to like Henry Kissinger, Mr. Globalism himself, you know. But it's amazing how this has all, you know, it's a lot. 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 the federal fuel economy standards you know i think it's it the best way to challenge that is to say why is the government involved in that at all yeah that's right i mean what businesses is it of the government to decree to you or i how many miles per gallon a vehicle that we choose to buy with our own money yeah must get where is that in the constitution and

where is the authority for the EPA in the constitution right and it's based on a fatuity you The argument is that if the government weren't doing this, then the mean old automakers would make nothing but gas-guzzling cars, and we'd all be at the mercy of big oil. It's nonsense. Before CAFE came along in the early 70s, there were plenty of fuel-efficient cars available. Yeah. So it's a lie. And, you know, these mandates that are coming out, the cafe thing costs you money.

Yeah, your car gets 35 miles per gallon, but it also costs $40,000 now. So you're really not saving any money because you've got this micro-engine turbocharged. hybrid augmented thing with a CBT transmission. And yay, I'm getting, you know, five miles more per gallon than I, you know, then 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 buy into this nonsense. That's right.

Yeah. I like this op-ed piece that you put out the last generation for this out yesterday. You started by saying, before the 90s, men drove cars and kids rode bicycles without helmets. Now men 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 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, you know, they make the cars so that they have different inserts that you can put in when they're small, when they can keep staying in that

car seat forever, you know, as they get older and older. It's amazing. It's terrible. 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 a crossover. Because if you've 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 that. So then you have to move up and buy this much more expensive vehicle. You know, I, you know, I just, I miss the days, you know, when we were kids, you went for a drive. Mom and dad, you open the door, just jump in the car and go. Yeah, now you've 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, to climb in these cars, they didn't have seatbelts. They didn't have padded dashboards or anything. We used to joke about it. Even when we were in high school, you know, they started putting in the seat belts. They weren't mandatory yet. And we used to laugh about it. So, yeah, we used to just somebody had an accent.

and we just hose the blood off the dashboard and saw the car again. Sure, you know, I understand that there is an increased risk. I know some people listening to us might be appalled at what I'm suggesting here, but I think it's gotten to be almost neurotic. No, I think it is neurotic. It is over the top fear that pervades our society about what might happen. You know, heaven for fend, 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.

I'll weigh costs, benefits, risks, and reward for myself. You have no right to parent another adult. That's right. Yeah, they would be absolutely appalled to see what happens in China when we were there, like 20 years ago. You know, you got somebody, the family, they don't have an SUV. They don't have a car. They got a motorcycle. And they just tell the little kids that are maybe, you know, four years old.

just hang on, you know. There's no seatbelt. There's nothing there. Somehow they managed to survive. I used to always laugh about the magic school bus. So the thing would come on and they would start by saying seatbelts. Everybody said, there's no seatbelts 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 site for news. Thank you, David. Appreciate it. Thank you.

They created. They created common past to track and control us. Their commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing in the communist future. They see the common man is simple, unsophisticated, ordinary, but each of us has worth and dignity created in the image of God. That is what we have in common. That is what they want to take away. Their most powerful weapons are isolation, deception, intimidation. They desire to know everything about us while they hide everything from us. It's time to turn that around and expose what they want to hide.

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