In-Car Surveillance is Coming | Diet TBPN

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  I wrote about this in-car surveillance thing. It's going viral. It's sort of fake news. We got to sort of truth zone it, but also it's coming and it might not matter because if you get in a robotaxi, there's definitely going to be a camera on you. But the fear is centered around this idea that there will be a requirement from the federal government that every new car sold in the United States will be required by law to have technology, uh-oh, that puts constant surveillance on the driver. And this is happening sooner than you think. By 2027, that's just 12 months away. AI in your car will determine if you're sober and fit to drive, automatically turning off the vehicle.

• 0:43Jordi Hays?

  John, it's almost May, by the way.

• 0:44John Coogan?

  I know. We're what, eight months away, I guess, from 2027? This is the real AI 2027 problem. This is, this is a big deal.

• 0:52Jordi Hays?

  We are having audio issues. It's most likely a nation-state.

• 0:57John Coogan?

  Potentially.

• 0:58Jordi Hays?

  It's very possible we are under attack, but we are working on it.

• 1:01John Coogan?

  It's like watching a dubbed foreign film. Well, maybe we can play this video of what happened the last time America tried to pull back on driving a car while intoxicated and some of the, some of the response, some of the backlash from the community. Can we pull this up? Okay, we're working on it.

• 1:23Jordi Hays?

  Wow, the production team is being humbled this morning.

• 1:26John Coogan?

  Humbled. Anyway, let me read through some of my take and then we'll play that funny video. So, sounds scary. Yeah, let's play this video.

• 1:33Speaker 02

  Drinking and driving here is viewed by some as downright undemocratic.

• 1:37Speaker 03

  It's kind of getting common this one. A fella can't put in a hard day's work, put in 11, 12 hours a day, and then get in your truck and at least rain one or two beers.

• 1:45Speaker 04

  They're making it laws where you can't drink when you want to. You have to wear a seatbelt when you're driving. Pretty soon we're gonna be communist country. Communist country.

• 1:58Jordi Hays?

  What, what, when was that? Was that the?

• 2:00John Coogan?

  Apparently that's real. I, I always, I've seen that video before. I always thought it was fake. I didn't realize that that was real. That feels like eighties, seventies, something like that.

• 2:10Jordi Hays?

  Eighties.

• 2:10John Coogan?

  Eighties, okay. Well, there was backlash then and there's backlash now. Some of it's a little bit overblown. This sounds very scary, you know, constant surveillance. The real, the real crazy version is camera that's watching you at all times. The government, the police and the automaker can just turn off your car whenever they want. That sounds bad. What's actually being proposed? What's actually on the timetable? So the rationale for this is good. And I, I think most people would agree that, that it is a reasonable thing to do to try and curb alcohol-related vehicle accidents, drunk driving. There's more than 10,000 alcohol-related deaths each year on US roads. That's a ton. Anything we can do to stop that, reduce that, totally worth working on, totally worth pursuing

• 2:56John Coogan?

  as long as it doesn't violate a whole bunch of other liberties or create more problems than it solves. Right? We want net positive impact here. Technology is getting better at detecting intoxication and it's getting a lot cheaper. So why not just ship drunk driver detection system with every car from the factory? That's the proposal. There are a bunch of potential downsides that we can get into, but it's important to get, set the facts straight about, set the facts straight about where we actually stand today. So the core concept here is generally correct. Congress did pass a mandate directing the NHTSA to create a standard for advanced drunk-driving prevention technology in new passenger vehicles. Now, the 2027 date that people are citing, that's not a hard deadline. The law was passed back in 2024 and in the actual law, it basically allowed for delays.

• 3:41John Coogan?

  So they said, the NHTSA will only issue a binding mandate requiring automakers to actually roll out this tech when the tech is ready and the NHTSA currently says that the technology is not ready. So in theory, the tech feels close, but the scale of the problem is so big, you can see why there's a delay here. Alcohol detection systems exist and are typically deployed for drivers with DUIs. You're familiar with blowing in the tube, probably, hopefully not personally. But the problem is that those little hoses that you blow into, those are active systems. They require you to actually sit there and do that for a minute. The government doesn't want that. That's not what the proposal is.

• 4:16Jordi Hays?

  They want passive.

• 4:17John Coogan?

  They want passive, which means breath sensing. So there's just like smell-a-vision, basically. If it smells alcohol, it doesn't turn on the car. The other one is fingerprint reading. So you put your finger on the start button and it scans into your finger and sees how many alcohol particles are inside, I guess. That sounds sci-fi, but we're close, I guess. There's a couple other ways you can solve that. And then camera system. Just look at the driver. If they look drunk, then don't turn on the car. So all of these seem like they could be close to being roughly accurate right now. Like you can imagine an AI startup or a university lab putting something together at a hackathon. That's 90% of the way there. Maybe 99% of the way there.

• 5:00John Coogan?

  Maybe even 99.9% of the way there. But the problem is that Americans drive a lot. The rough estimate is that there are almost a quarter trillion driving trips per year in America. It's basically every American, all 350 million of them, basically, taking an average of two trips every single day of the year. So 224 billion trips a year is what the rough back of the envelope I did was. And what that means in practice is that if this system is 99.9% accurate, you're still looking at tens of millions of incorrect results every year. And the fact that probably 99.9% of these trips are not inebriated,

• 5:42John Coogan?

  like drunk driving is not 50% of trips. It's not 1% of trips. It's a very small amount.

• 5:46Jordi Hays?

  Think about how people would abuse this new system. It'd be like students being like, "Sorry, I couldn't make it to the exam."

• 5:52John Coogan?

  Exactly. "Dog ate my lunch." My car wouldn't start because of a false positive on this. And so even if you're at 99%, you're still looking at tens of millions of incorrect results. The vast majority of those are going to be people who are sober. Somebody wants to get in their car for their morning commute. They're a little sleepy. Or they wore some cologne that triggered some sensor. System flags them as intoxicated and prevents them from starting their car. And it's infuriating. The tech will probably get there with enough time and effort. So it's worth looking into who supports this and opposes it. The mandate was actually bipartisan, but there's starting to be a backlash from libertarian conservatives who are worried about Orwellian government controls. There's an idea that there will be a remote kill switch, which leads to a bunch of dystopian possibilities.

• 6:34John Coogan?

  That is not in the current provision. That's not what's actually being proposed right now. But, you know, it's possible that at the end, that the end result of this process of back and forth, you do wind up with that exact capability. And so people are worried about the system going off while you're driving at speed on the, on the roads. And then the car just shuts off and you get in a crash. And that's like actually more dangerous than potentially the alternative. And so the middle ground seems to be what's called pre-drive lockout.

• 7:00Jordi Hays?

  We need a tinfoil expert. The tinfoil enthusiasts have been saying that the sort of remote.

• 7:06John Coogan?

  Are you using tinfoil enthusiasts to mean conspiracy theorists? I've never heard that before. It's good.

• 7:13Jordi Hays?

  That's a, that's a new one.

• 7:15John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 7:15Jordi Hays?

  So tinfoil enthusiasts.

• 7:17John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 7:17Jordi Hays?

  Have been claiming.

• 7:19John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 7:19Jordi Hays?

  That the remote shut off button has existed forever.

• 7:22John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Since the, since the 1985.

• 7:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So when, when, when some sort of like, you know, witness or, or something like that just gets in a very inconveniently timed, high-speed wreck. That is.

• 7:36John Coogan?

  That's shut down. Oh, okay. I was unfamiliar with this conspiracy theory. It's interesting though. But, uh, yeah. So, I mean, the current, the current like consensus is around maybe pre-drive lockout being the more moderate solution than actually shutting the car off once it's driving. Still incredibly, incredibly inconvenient if there's false positives. And then you also do still run into some potential negatives outcomes where you go to the beach, you have a couple of glasses of wine, you're not planning on leaving, but then the tsunami warning goes off. You need to get back in your car and your car says, no. Like, I don't care that there's a tsunami.

• 8:07Jordi Hays?

  Oh.

• 8:07John Coogan?

  I don't care that there's a tsunami. You have had two glasses of wine. You're at point oh eight. You can't drive right now and you need to tell the car, well, in this case, I I'm OK with driving drunk because the tsunami is coming and I'm at the beach and I had a couple of glasses of wine. And the car won't be able to, you know, potentially, you know, deal with that nuance, right?

• 8:27Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 8:27John Coogan?

  And there's a whole bunch of other, yeah, and there's a whole bunch of other scenarios that could potentially play out. Just judiciousness is is difficult, but potentially unlocked, you know, AI agents, I don't know. You know, you ask these models, what would they do in some certain scenario? Maybe there's a solution.

• 8:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think there's a much, much stronger argument for rolling this out as soon as the average vehicle.

• 8:48John Coogan?

  Is just full self-driving.

• 8:49Jordi Hays?

  Has has full self-driving capability.

• 8:52John Coogan?

  But then, but then you don't need it because you can be as drunk as you want.

• 8:55Jordi Hays?

  No, I still, I still think there's going to be this big window where where where you're not going to be able to.

• 9:00John Coogan?

  So, so maybe.

• 9:01Jordi Hays?

  Specifically because if you need, as long as somebody needs to sit in the front seat of their car.

• 9:06John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 9:07Jordi Hays?

  Potentially take over on in any type of situation.

• 9:11John Coogan?

  I like the idea of level four self-driving. You get in the car. There's one button you push to say, hey, just put it in self-driving mode. I've had a couple of drinks. Don't let me take the wheel.

• 9:21Jordi Hays?

  No matter how hard I try to negotiate.

• 9:24John Coogan?

  It's all disabled. It's just play Playmobil level. But then there's a second button and for that you have to do a full blood transfusion. They take, they they centrifuge your blood and make sure that you have the purest blood possible to take to take the wheel and be able to actually drive the vehicle.

• 9:40Jordi Hays?

  Maybe something there.

• 9:41John Coogan?

  I did have, I did have a take on this though, which is that Doug Jamero, friend of the show, founder of cardsandbids.com, has always talked about the eras of cars, you know, the air-cooled Porsches. Then you have the the fully manual, no, no, no electronic systems, no stability control, no traction control, those types of cars. Then you get into the the manual gearboxes, the no turbos, no hybrid systems. And then the modern supercar era is just a bonus if it's not a full electric car. It's like, you know, it's going to be a hybrid, but is it, is it, is it, at least there's. An engine of some sort, and that's what car collectors are sort of marking these moments where it's like, it's the last manual.

• 10:21John Coogan?

  It's the last non, you know, non-hybrid supercar made by Ferrari or something like that.

• 10:27Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 10:28John Coogan?

  And there's gonna be a world where you're like, oh, that was the last one that didn't have the camera that looked at you 24/7 or whatever. And I think it creates this like new class of like vintage cars.

• 10:37Speaker 05

  Investment, investment grade.

• 10:39John Coogan?

  Maybe not investment grade, but certainly something that people, I mean, you can already see people reacting to this, even though the post is like a little bit overhyped. You can already see people reacting to it being like, I gotta buy a 2026 and hold on to it forever and keep it in great condition because I don't want that. But anyway, there's been a pushback on this stuff for a long time. Tyler, do you have anything on, on cars? Are you old enough to drive?

• 10:59Speaker 05

  I was just thinking like, like, what do you think the premium is for a car that you can still like drunk driving?

• 11:03John Coogan?

  I think, I think your car is, is, is gonna go through the roof.

• 11:06Speaker 05

  This is not, this is not, this is not even worth joking about.

• 11:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. Anyway.

• 11:11Speaker 05

  Bad joke.

• 11:12Speaker 06

  Stop the fucking charade!

• 11:15Speaker 05

  Move on.

• 11:15John Coogan?

  Moving on. What else is going on? Uh, we gotta talk about the GPT 5.5 prompt for Codex, which seems to have a duplicated line trying to get it to not talk about creatures. Tyler, you dug into this. What is actually going on?

• 11:29Speaker 05

  Uh, yeah. So it just seems like there's, there was some like emergent property of the new model where it always tries to talk about like kind of creatures and goblins.

• 11:38Jordi Hays?

  Raccoons.

• 11:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, ogres are in there.

• 11:39Jordi Hays?

  Trolls, ogres, pigeons.

• 11:41John Coogan?

  And so in.

• 11:43Speaker 05

  They had to counteract this, right? You have to put in the system prompt to tell it not to do this.

• 11:46John Coogan?

  Where is this? Creatures? Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures, unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user's query. This reminds me of those old image prompts where like there would be a negative prompt that specifically said like, do not put six fingers on the human's hand. But what a, what a weird one and what an odd, what an odd line to throw into a coding agent. Like, do we know anything else about this? Have people dug into like, what is actually going on here?

• 12:20Speaker 05

  I mean, it might not be just the coding agent.

• 12:21Jordi Hays?

  I don't.

• 12:22Speaker 05

  It's probably just the model in general.

• 12:23Jordi Hays?

  It's the, it's the, it's the model itself.

• 12:25John Coogan?

  It's Goblin mode.

• 12:26Jordi Hays?

  The model itself yearns to discuss creatures, goblins, raccoons. It is an emergent property of superintelligence.

• 12:36John Coogan?

  Vi says, "They had to put this in due to my effect on the company. Goblins, creatures sort of followed me in through the front door when I joined and we are only just now starting to understand the downstream effects of their presence." And Tebow says, "Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it's absolutely..."

• 12:56Jordi Hays?

  There's so many.

• 12:57John Coogan?

  If you know, you know.

• 12:58Jordi Hays?

  Somebody says, "My, my 5.5 Kodak said Goblin with a flashlight when referring to a bug fix yesterday."

• 13:07John Coogan?

  Star Wars meets Pawn Stars. Have you seen this video? Have you watched this, Jordy? I did see this. People are going crazy. I saw the first second. I haven't watched the full thing, but I think it's probably worth it.

• 13:17Speaker 07

  It's pretty incredible.

• 13:19Speaker 06

  I have items to pawn.

• 13:21Speaker 07

  All right, let's see what you got.

• 13:27Speaker 07

  Okay, so these are lightsabers.

• 13:29Speaker 06

  Correct.

• 13:30Speaker 07

  So, uh, where'd you get them?

• 13:34Speaker 06

  Estate sale.

• 13:35Speaker 07

  Estate sale?

• 13:37Jordi Hays?

  It's so funny that you can clock it by the audio more than the video.

• 13:41John Coogan?

  It's very weird.

• 13:41Speaker 06

  I've been a collector for many years. It is a great passion of mine. Each lightsaber has a story that he's telling. There is a certain...

• 13:51John Coogan?

  I mean, I guess the character is CGI to begin with. So it's, it's hard to clock, but even he's probably fully AI. Video, or maybe it's edited together. I don't know. But yeah, you're 100% right. It's the audio that's awful.

• 14:07Speaker 07

  That's rough, man. How much are you looking to get for him?

• 14:10Speaker 06

  A hundred thousand credits.

• 14:14Speaker 07

  Look, I'll give you 50 bucks for him.

• 14:18John Coogan?

  It's interesting that, uh, why that's popular is because it's this mashup between two intellectual pieces of property and they're not being compensated for that. And so there's like this thing that can only exist in the piracy world, basically. Like, if someone, if you had recreated this without leveraging Star Wars IP or Pawn Stars IP, doesn't go viral, right? And so the, the business case for AI video is still a little bit more narrow and I think it will be tucked in the tool section. I was, I was, uh, yeah, looking a lot at like the, the Aflac project that he sold to Netflix and some of the background replacements, some

• 14:59John Coogan?

  of the VFX stuff. Like, it feels like the way, even though this is like this, oh, it's like one-shotting entertainment, uh, it feels like the next moment of like AI in Hollywood is very much like tool-driven, uh, you know, leveraging things like, you know, green screen removal and, uh, object replacement, VFX workflows and just sort of speeding up remote, uh, like rote tasks. But people will continue to have fun with these mashups and I'm sure we'll see many more of them on the timeline.

• 15:31Jordi Hays?

  The other news, uh, Mike Isaac and his team over at the New York Times are in the courtroom, live blogging.

• 15:38John Coogan?

  They're blogging. They went.

• 15:39Jordi Hays?

  They're blogging. They're blogging. It is.

• 15:42John Coogan?

  There's some crazy moments already, right?

• 15:43Jordi Hays?

  There's some crazy, crazy moments already.

• 15:47John Coogan?

  The judge is like doing bits.

• 15:48Jordi Hays?

  We'll try to put some of them together. The judge is doing, the judge is doing bits. Apparently, uh, Elon's lawyer's microphone turned off four times in the course of his opening statement.

• 15:58John Coogan?

  Or maybe like the screen turned off at one point. I saw some different reporting on that.

• 16:02Jordi Hays?

  Apparently on the fifth.

• 16:03John Coogan?

  There were technical issues.

• 16:03Jordi Hays?

  Fifth or so time, the judge says, what can I tell you? We are funded by the federal government. So.

• 16:09John Coogan?

  That's wild.

• 16:10Jordi Hays?

  She's running, she's running bits. Uh, but, uh, highly recommend going over and, uh,

• 16:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, Mike Isaac has some fantastic coverage.

• 16:18Jordi Hays?

  Their posts are still. Rolling in.

• 16:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:22Jordi Hays?

  It's a lot to go through because it's hours and hours and hours of content, but we'll try to pull out some of the highlights and go through it on tomorrow's show.

• 16:32John Coogan?

  The other thing you should listen to is Patrick O'Shaughnessy had Paul Tudor Jones, one of the greatest macro traders of all time, on Invest Like the Best. It's an hour and 11 minutes and you should go listen to it. So go take a listen. It already has 5,000 likes, 1.7 million views, not nearly enough downloads. So go add it to your podcast player right now. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, sign up for our newsletter, tbpn.com.

• 16:59Jordi Hays?

  Can't wait to see you tomorrow.

• 17:01John Coogan?

  See you tomorrow.

• 17:01Jordi Hays?

  Have the best afternoon of your life. We love you.

• 17:03John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Flashbang. Out. Goodbye.