CEOInterviews.AI
Start App
John Coogan
Co-founder & Co-host, TBPN

Paramount Bounces, Snap Specs, AI Affirmations, Chase Lochmiller Joins, Joe Weisenthal IRL

📅 Sep 17, 2026 TBPN 181 MIN 12077 VIEWS 555 SEGMENTS · 3 SPEAKERS
00:02:34:25 Snap officially launches Specs 00:27:18:12 Paramount scouts offices in Nashville 00:30:25:01 Reacting to new clip from 'The Social Reckoning' 00:41:00:03 Japan’s monks turn to investing 00:55:51:23 Aaref Hilaly discusses Bain Capital Ventures’ post-AGI investment strategy, arguing that abundant intelligence will unlock transformative opportunities in robotics, drug discovery, simulation, and AI applications. A partner at Bain Capital Ventures, he also explains the firm’s $1.6 billion fund, its early-stage focus, and its approach of backing ambitious founders while connecting them w...

What John Coogan said

Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.

John Coogan discussed Snap's Specs launch, noting the device's $2,200 price and $2,400 Wi-Fi-free option, and expressed skepticism about AR's market appeal, favoring VR. He covered Paramount's potential move to Nashville, suggesting the LA lot could become a data center. Coogan highlighted OpenAI's progress, including solving a 1918 cipher and considering a $1.2 trillion valuation. He analyzed the 'neopost-legacy media' trend, citing Casey Newton and Kevin Roose licensing their show to NPR. Coogan interviewed Bain Capital Ventures partners about their $1.6 billion post-AGI fund, Crusoe's Series F and gigawatt-scale AI campus, and Lora's legal AI strategy, including a 30% LLM cost reduction. He also discussed Beacon's acquisition of Haze Labs and Decagon's international expansion.

Key takeaways

  1. Snap's Specs cost $2,200, or $2,400 without Wi-Fi, and Coogan remains bearish on AR's mass adoption.
  2. Bain Capital Ventures raised a $1.6 billion fund focused on post-AGI investment opportunities.
  3. Crusoe closed a Series F co-led by Atreides, Valor Equity Partners, and Mubadala, with buildings 7-8 coming online before year end.
  4. Lora reduced overall LLM spend by 30 percentage points over a weekend by building its own router.
  5. Coogan predicts more 'neopost-legacy media' deals, citing Casey Newton and Kevin Roose licensing their show to NPR.

Numbers and commitments

FigureWhat it refers toTypeAt
$2,200 Price of Snap's Specs device price 4:01
$2,400 Price of Snap's Specs without Wi-Fi option price 4:01
$1.6 billion Bain Capital Ventures Fund 11 size guidance 1:04:15
$225 billion Bain Capital assets under management metric 1:04:00
30 percentage points Decrease in Lora's overall LLM spend metric 1:29:59
1.2 trillion OpenAI's considered pre-IPO valuation other 38:49
8 buildings Crusoe's Abilene campus total buildings metric 1:42:21
mid-2027 Target for first SMR-powered AI factory with Alo timeline 1:45:45
10 days Frequency of Beacon's acquisitions metric 1:58:16
1918 Year of German radio transmission deciphered by GPT-6 Astra other 37:04

Chapters

  1. 0:00Snap Specs launch review
  2. 37:04OpenAI's cipher and valuation news
  3. 44:54Neopost-legacy media trend
  4. 56:03Bain Capital Ventures post-AGI fund
  5. 1:26:40Lora's legal AI strategy
  6. 1:38:59Crusoe's AI infrastructure buildout
  7. 1:49:08Decagon's international expansion
  8. 1:57:39Beacon acquires Haze Labs

Questions asked in this interview

2
  1. 29:17... situation and certainly no insider knowledge, I would assume that they want a Nashville HQ anyways, just because there's a lot of momentum there, as you know, just in the region, but it also in the meantime serves as a real bluff, right?
  2. 34:41And did you put down a deposit or did you actually just pay the full thing in advance?
John Coogan 0:00 ↗
You're watching TBPN. Today is Thursday, September 17th, 2026. We're live from the TV Ultradon, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
Dang, son. Where'd you raise this? That a wild one. That is a wild I I don't think we played that one. We haven't. Yeah, that's a new one. I don't know if that's actually a keeper. It's kind of a little weird. Yeah, I think the start of it is funny. Dang, son. We have Joe Weisenthal coming to Teen Pin Ultra. First time in person. We've done OddLots in person with him, but he's coming on down. Uh we're doing a Bane Capital deep dive today. Uh talking to partners on the venture side, then David Gross, who's the managing partner, talking about the history of the firm. He was doing special situations in Japan, went to Japan very early on his career, grew the Asia business, and now is overseeing Bane Capital, become this uh really large asset management firm with a bunch of different strategies. So, I think we'll have an interesting economic perspective outlook. The theme of the uh Bane Capital Ventures announcement is uh the post AGI economy.
Finally, we still got a job for asset managers. That's what you're thinking. you know, everyone was saying, you know, but also I'm glad to get kind of past this current moment. A lot of tension and I'm ready for the next chapter. It is uh but it'll be interesting to hear how they're actually thinking about investing, wrestling with what's going on at the foundation model layer, but then still investing both above and below the fold as I'd like to put it. So, Lorra is coming on doing legal AI, basically a rapper company. They're optimistic about that. But then they're also investing in Crusoe. We have Jayce Lock Miller coming back on the show uh to talk about building infrastructure for the AI buildout. And so they're they're they have this sort of sandwich strategy which is pretty interesting. And then we dec Jordy and I are all back for another. Thank you for being with us.
Yeah, you know, Theo Theo has been playing along with that meme a lot. And I think uh I mean it it was it was the current thing for a minute there. Um, but uh he put out a tier list of all the different controversies surrounding him and he put this he put the the and I as S tier. It's like the it's the best controversy he's ever been a part of. Uh it's it's such a funny thing and I hope it lives on as a meme. I hope people continue to do it. Uh because it when applied correctly, it's uh it's a chef's kiss. Uh anyway, uh Snap officially launched Specs yesterday. Uh, some of the team members here got to go check it out in person. I get there. I'm like, "This is perfect. It's 3 p.m. Atlas Creatine Cycles in town. I want to meet up with him." I'm like, "Great. You're going to this thing. I have an invite to this thing. I'll see you there. We'll catch up there." Super convenient for both of us. I got a 30-minute call beforehand. It ends right before the thing starts. That runs to 50 minutes. So, I'm 20 minutes late. Get my badge, walk in immediately, get a phone call. Hey, they call me about to be I had another call. You got to hop on early. So, I leave and then I have another 90-minute call. So, I truly missed the entire thing, but I did get to go inside, have one glass of water, talk to one person, Harper Carroll, former guest of the show, now out in Austin reporting on AI. Um, and uh that was electric. But then I didn't actually get to see the presentation or do the demos. So, uh it was basically a quick turnaround for me. And I was like, why why did I think I could pull this off? Uh, I failed. But, uh, did the launch fail? We'll see. We'll talk to the folks who actually went. Tyler, Nick, we're not asking for a full review. I just want take us through the day. I saw you guys pull up and you guys didn't see me. I was on the street on the call. You guys get waved around. You valet. Walk me through your journey into the uh the launch. Like, what? You go in, you have cocktails. What What happened?
Yeah, have a drink. Okay, go in. What are they serving? Screaming Eagle or, you know, seltzer water? Some kind of cocktail. Did they have the original Four Loko? Were they serving the original Four Loko? I wish. Yeah. Multiple pints of Guinness. Do they have Natural Light? I could totally see Evan cracking out the, cracking open the secret supply of original Four Loko. You know that guy has... you know he has a bunker with the original Four Loko. Yeah. So everyone's having some drinks, then you sit down, chopping it up, then you go into the amphitheater.
Jordi Hays 4:35 ↗
And it's sort of like Steve Jobs iPhone launch vibes, right?
John Coogan 4:38 ↗
Yeah. You know, he's standing in front of this big screen. There's like beautiful images behind him. Walks out, black shirt, jeans. Okay. Yeah. Then he starts doing live demos.
Jordi Hays 4:47 ↗
He did lean into the memes, right? I saw on screen a picture that had clearly been photoshopped or AI'd to make the specs look even bigger. So he was aware that people thought they were chunky, that they were large.
John Coogan 4:57 ↗
Yeah. So he gives his demo. What's his pitch?
Jordi Hays 5:02 ↗
Yeah. So there's like a number of ways that he kind of talked about it. One is like he basically positioned against being on your phone a lot. You want to stay very present, right? You don't want to be looking down at the screens all the time. You want to be... you want to look through the screen. Yes. Right. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Close to your face. Yeah.
John Coogan 5:20 ↗
And I've heard that pitch a few times. Do you believe that? Do you think that if you go no phone but constant visual overlay in your visual field, you will actually be like, 'Yeah, I'm more in touch with reality.' It worked.
Jordi Hays 5:36 ↗
Yeah. I've never understood that part of the pitch. It's actually, 'We know you're addicted to your phone, so here's another product that will actually always be attached to your face,' where they were going to spin as helping you kind of reconnect with reality. It's an odd pitch.
John Coogan 5:51 ↗
It really doesn't work on me because I like the barbell strategy of brain rot and stimulation, where I am actually fine to be like, give me the fully virtual world. I want to be locked in. I want the screen as big as possible. I want to be in World War II. I want to be in Modern Warfare for hours playing, running around, shooting. I want it to be all the audio. I don't want to hear anything else. I want noise cancellation. I want to be in that world and then I want to be able to unplug and then just go into the actual world and sit down and have a chat with you and have a coffee and not be checking our phones and actually be fully present when I'm fully present in the real world, and then I want to be fully in the virtual world. So I want the VR, the fully immersive thing, and then zero immersion, and I'm actually not looking for more things that are in the middle. And I'm wondering if that will resonate with people.
Jordi Hays 6:47 ↗
I think that's mostly because you haven't seen very good examples. And like right now, the glasses are still kind of big and bulky. If they were very minimal and kind of, you know, they would show very small... The boys were, people online were thinking that the guy in the center was Cali.
John Coogan 7:02 ↗
Yeah. It's actually Tyler. It's actually Tyler and Nick and Atlas.
Jordi Hays 7:07 ↗
So is he wearing untinted versions and you guys are wearing tinted versions? Yes. Or can you say like, 'I want tinting on right now'? So I think you can increase the tinting, but there's also just... there's two SKUs. Yeah, I believe so. Okay. Okay. Yeah. So you got to get both, I guess.
John Coogan 7:24 ↗
Anyway, when did you actually get to the... Dan says, 'John raising a second family in VR, trying to keep them separated.' Yes. The COD lobby is my second family for sure. So he gives a pitch.
Jordi Hays 7:41 ↗
Yeah. He does mention live demos. And are the demos consumer-focused, enterprise-focused?
John Coogan 7:49 ↗
Yeah. So the live demos he did were all very consumer. He showed live shopping, and you could like, he was going to look for an espresso machine, then he pulls it and puts it on a table in front of them, like, see how big it is and stuff like that.
Jordi Hays 8:03 ↗
Any live demo failures? Any Wi-Fi issues? There was kind of one where he tried to pull up a YouTube video. Okay. And then so he said like, 'Hey, specs.' So he's talking to a voice assistant that controls it. Pull up a video about specs, and then it opens the browser view, goes to YouTube, and then he tries to click on a video to open it and it doesn't really work. Oh, okay. But it eventually worked. It seemed like it worked. It was like a small hiccup. It wasn't like a big... Yeah, yeah, yeah. It wasn't a demo fail. Yeah, makes sense. Okay. So...
John Coogan 8:34 ↗
And there was a very cool live demo of someone, there was like kind of an interactive music creator tool where you could move around and it would play different sounds, and so she did this very cool live demo.
Jordi Hays 8:46 ↗
So she was creating a song, but instead of using traditional instruments, the instruments were puppeteered by her movements in the physical world. Got it. Okay. Cool. So was there any enterprise pitch?
John Coogan 8:58 ↗
There were no live demos of that, but there were some videos played. Like one was, it's like imagine you're an electrician and you're basically looking at this big server box and you don't know where to plug in the wire, and it would highlight which plug you put it into. Yeah. Which I think could be interesting.
Jordi Hays 9:15 ↗
Yeah, that feels like something that sounds good, but I have no actual real experience there to say like, yeah, that's what will solve the bottleneck in electricians. Yeah. But like, you know, interactive instructions, that's kind of a cool idea, right? You're building IKEA furniture or something and it tells you what to do. Yeah. Yeah. Something like that. Yeah, I can see that being...
John Coogan 9:36 ↗
Yeah. But then the keynote ends and then we go outside and there's like a bunch of places to do live demos. So yeah, the first one we did is, well, you basically put on the glasses and you do some kind of calibration thing. You figure out how the motion works. There's no little secondary, like I think on the MetaQuest displays there's like that little wristband. There's nothing like that. Nothing like that. It's just hand tracking. Yeah. It's similar to the Apple Vision Pro kind of interactions. And then yeah, the one I really liked was ping pong. So your hand is the paddle and you're playing ping pong. I think there's actually a video of it playing. Yeah. Yeah. The other... play it. So the ping pong thing...
Jordi Hays 10:22 ↗
Do a little tier list for me of ways to do ping pong. We'll start with the real ping pong. Where's that? F tier, D tier, C tier, B tier, A tier. Obviously, I think it's S tier. S tier. Okay. Well, what am I comparing it to? Full VR. Full VR ping pong. Would you rather play ping pong in VR or real life?
John Coogan 10:48 ↗
Well, so obviously you would rather play in real life, but would you actually play in real life? So if my friend lives 100 miles away, I'm not going to be able to play ping pong, but I can play in VR, right? So I think that boosts it, right? So it's also S tier. What about... I think it's like B because in the augmented reality ping pong table... No. No. Okay. So it creates... Yeah, we can see, but I'm just waving my hand. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There. This is... um... future right here. Yeah. And then this was, I can talk about why, but this is probably more like C tier. It's definitely worse than VR. I think one of the reasons is because there's no actual controller. So the...
Jordi Hays 11:26 ↗
Oh, you don't have the weight or anything. It's a little bit... Oh, that's interesting. It's actually worse even though you don't have a controller. Normally, it's like get rid of the controller. That's just extra weight, batteries, equipment. I think for gaming, the controller actually works because you get really precise. But typically these systems allow third-party peripherals. So you can whip up a, you can wire up an Xbox controller like what Oculus did, or MetaQuest, where they just use the Xbox controller for those types of games.
John Coogan 11:51 ↗
Yeah, I do think like this was the coolest demo I did, and this is something that like, there's really no reason why this needs to be in AR. This could just be completely VR because I'm looking at the ball. I'm not looking at people in front of me. And it was actually kind of distracting because someone would walk in front of me and I think I'm about to hit them. Oh, sure. Sure. Because I can see them. Maybe better to just occlude the world. Yeah. Or do some passthrough stuff. Yeah.
Jordi Hays 12:17 ↗
I'm still oddly bearish on augmented reality and more bullish on virtual reality, where you're not recycling photons, where instead you just have cameras on the outside that then repro that on the inside of the headsets so that you can get a wider field of view. And then if you're in a bright scene, you can still overlay things, you can darken things. But in augmented reality, I don't believe it's physically possible to look at a bright light and put a dark object in front of it, because the only thing that these glasses can do is add light to the scene. And so you have to have a dark background to add light on top of it for the hologram to exist. I mean, I found it was bright enough I could clearly see everything.
John Coogan 13:04 ↗
That is pretty impressive. Yeah, it was outside. It was outside. It was a bright day. It's in LA. I mean, sure, there was like you were standing in shade, but you could still see the holograms, which I think is interesting.
Jordi Hays 13:14 ↗
Yeah, I didn't try watching any like movies or anything.
John Coogan 13:16 ↗
Yeah.
Jordi Hays 13:17 ↗
Which I think would definitely be better in VR if...
John Coogan 13:19 ↗
You should have been like, you're gonna let me demo this. Can I just do one? Can I just do one demo real quick? Snap.
Jordi Hays 13:24 ↗
Lawrence of Arabia.
John Coogan 13:25 ↗
Lawrence of Arabia.
Jordi Hays 13:27 ↗
I'd like to watch David Lean from start to finish to really understand if this is the product for me.
John Coogan 13:33 ↗
See you in three hours.
To me, it's so interesting how high the bar is in this category. Like when the technology industry was making the first like mobile phones, the bar was like, can it make a call? Can you receive a call? Can you do that semi-reliably? Yeah, even if the service is spotty, because you were competing against the pay phone you had. Now it's like every new device competes with the smartphone. And I just think like the Meta Ray-Ban displays, I haven't seen any of them out in the real world. It seems like those are not doing well. I think that this whole category is still going to be quite challenged.
Jordi Hays 14:14 ↗
Yeah. Even just the basic Meta Ray-Bans, they compete with the smartphone, but they also compete with AirPods, and like the Apple ecosystem is like remarkably robust in terms of like the Meta Ray-Ban users that I know that like the product are like, well, I like them, but I often just like take phone calls on them. I listen to music on them when I'm going for a walk, and then occasionally I'll take a picture, and it's like that's saving you five seconds to get a worse quality photo than if you have a nice phone and your headphones. I guess it's a little bit less intrusive to have the speakers up here as opposed to like in your ears. It looks a little bit normal if you walk up to someone, you pause your music, you walk in, you order a coffee, people are like, 'Oh, he didn't even take out his headphones while he's talking to me.' Kind of antisocial as opposed to like, oh, he still has his glasses on, but they're not playing audio, so I don't have a weird reaction to it. So there's a little bit of benefit, but yes, it's very, very incremental. It's very rare that these things like unlock entirely new capabilities.
John Coogan 15:12 ↗
Is there any content ecosystem that you think that they can plug into? Like the killer app on Apple Vision Pro in my experience has been the Apple TV app. Like it's like they already have a library of every movie and 3D movies and IMAX movies, and so there are great movies that you can watch in that thing. And with the like, it's like what was the last Oculus or Meta Quest partnership? It was like the Xbox edition. Why is that important? It's because like they want you to fire it up and install Xbox and be streaming Xbox games. So you get the Xbox library on that device on day one. And the fact that it's a Meta product, yes, you could scroll Instagram Reels in there, but that's clearly not the killer library that they need to bring to bear. They need to bring games. So they've partnered with Xbox for 2D games, not VR games even, but it's like at least you could go and play a lot of, you know, BioShock or whatever is on there. And is there any glimmer of like where the big content pool might come from once you've played enough ping pong?
Jordi Hays 16:24 ↗
Yeah, I really don't know because yeah, like movies and games are just I think always going to be better on VR.
John Coogan 16:30 ↗
Yep.
Jordi Hays 16:30 ↗
And then like there's not like an existing library of like AR, you know, experiences.
John Coogan 16:37 ↗
Yeah. Because like the only thing I can think of is like actual Snapchat lenses, right? That's like an AR library. But like, you know, what are you going to do with that? So I think like...
Jordi Hays 16:46 ↗
Laugh when everyone you meet looks like a hot dog or something, or like a cat has dog ears.
John Coogan 16:50 ↗
Dog ears. Yeah. The dog filter on everyone IRL. That's wild.
Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.
So next week we might get a competitor to this. Next week is Meta Connect, I believe, and they're on a track like Reality Labs. Obviously all the energy is around AI, but the team is still working on devices augmenting reality. They did the Meta Ray-Ban displays, which is the Call of Duty style, you know, mini map. It doesn't take over the full cone of vision, but two years ago Mark Zuckerberg demoed a product at Meta Connect two years ago, 2024, of what he called the Orion, which was a very, very complicated name if you know the history of the hunter Orion who tried to kill all the animals and was, you know, sacrificed for it as a tale of hubris. But anyway, hopefully this doesn't go like the Orion story, because every time Meta names something, it has like this accidental...
Jordi Hays 18:01 ↗
I mean, it happened to OpenAI too. The big GPT, the big pre-train that was supposed to be like GPT-5 was called Orion at one point, I think.
John Coogan 18:09 ↗
And so like, never name your product after a hubristic Greek tale. Anyway, the Meta Ray-Ban displays launch a lot next year, and it felt like this year is the year that you get the Meta Ray-Ban full displays. And so that Orion product should be here. It should be a direct competitor to Specs, and it would time up, and it would actually make sense that, you know, the Snap team sees that, okay, they're going to release this on this day, we got to get out early. We got to be a week before. And so I would expect that next week we get a direct competitor to Specs, meaning a Meta Ray-Ban form factor, probably a little bit thinner, a little bit smaller, a little bit lighter. Meta has more resources for this. They've been working on it longer, and it should be augmented reality that can take over a fairly wide field of view. I imagine that that's going to be a big comparison table, not just price. It'll probably be expensive. I mean, the Meta Ray-Bans, a couple hundred bucks. Meta Ray-Ban displays, 800 bucks, something like that. And I would expect that the full display is maybe...
Jordi Hays 19:09 ↗
1500.
John Coogan 19:11 ↗
Probably 1500 bucks or something, but still cheaper than what Specs is, which is 2200, something like that. But the real question is, will they launch the Quest 4? Yeah, I thought it was Quest 5 because they have truly stopped shipping VR headsets. Can you give us the history of the launches of the Meta Quest VR headsets? Because the Quest 1 launched in 2020.
Jordi Hays 19:37 ↗
2019.
John Coogan 19:38 ↗
2019. Okay.
Jordi Hays 19:39 ↗
Question. To be clear, if you were wearing smart glasses, you could stop the conversation and just ask the question, wait for a response, and just read it off, and then read it back to us, or you could just ask...
John Coogan 19:51 ↗
Do what you're doing. Yeah.
Jordi Hays 19:53 ↗
Yeah.
Okay. So, Quest 2 is 2020. Quest Pro is 2022. Quest 3 is 2023. Quest 3S is 2024. That's the most recent.
John Coogan 20:03 ↗
And then the Xbox edition was like a light turn. That's what we did on the show last year. But no truly new hardware in 2025 or 2026. And now it's expected 2027. It would be such a wild card if all of a sudden Mark Zuckerberg was like, 'I did it. Great VR. I've solved it. You counted me out. And here's the gift of the Apple Vision Pro.'
Jordi Hays 20:26 ↗
Yeah. Truly, no one cares about VR. And it makes me think that the truly incredible, like eventually we'll get the breakthrough smart glasses. Eventually we'll get the breakthrough VR product. But I have a feeling that the adoption curve is going to just be slow because the entire world is like, I just don't care anymore. I truly, show me whatever demo you want. I do not care. I'm not going to try it. I'm not going to buy it. It doesn't matter to me. It doesn't matter to my life.
John Coogan 20:58 ↗
And it's interesting because it's so different than language models, which like GPTs, GPT, you know, generative text models have existed. And the GPT-3 API came out in 2020, and you could, you know, actually go and try and interact with it, but it didn't have like a national marketing campaign around it. Yeah. It truly was like in the lab.
Jordi Hays 21:19 ↗
Smart glasses are like the most push marketing dollars for years.
John Coogan 21:24 ↗
So long. Yeah. For years. And so there's been so many like little pop-up VR experiences, integrations at theme parks. Like it's been said, oh, it's the next big thing. It's been on the cover of Time magazine. Like there's been a lot of attention before getting to product-market fit, whereas LLMs were like truly in the research lab for like a decade, and then once it was actually good enough, it just came out and immediately went viral, and everyone was on chat.com, and then it was just like, boom, it's now a thing, and then it was off to the races. Interesting. But I don't know. I do.
Jordi Hays 21:58 ↗
Yeah. It feels like with every demo, it feels like once each of these devices is 10 times better, there might be a market. Yeah. But I actually am not even confident that the end market is really going to be quite as exciting as the excitement that you've had from Zuck and Evan and all these people. Yeah.
And I think there's potentially other routes to get to that sort of like ambient computing, you know, just sort of this always-available personal assistant that aren't on your face, but we'll see.
John Coogan 22:40 ↗
I mean, Valve is working on new VR headsets still. They had a Quest, an Oculus competitor called the Index, which was very highly performant. We should pull up some images of the new Steam Frame. So Valve, the very secretive private company controlled by Gabe Newell, is launching a Steam Machine, which is a desktop box, a Steam Controller, and then also a Steam Frame, which is a VR headset. It can do some stuff directly on the headset, but it mostly performs best when all the rendering is happening on a gaming PC. So it's designed to be used in concert with a gaming PC. So they are leaning into like, this is a gaming peripheral. This is for somebody that has a gaming PC, they're in the Steam ecosystem, and we want to give them a great experience. So all the rendering happens on the computer, and then it just streams to your headset. That is a very funny promotional photo. Go to the next one.
Jordi Hays 23:44 ↗
Look how happy he looks.
John Coogan 23:45 ↗
With the goatee, it's really like, this is a gamer. The gamer goatee is great.
Jordi Hays 23:51 ↗
Have you ever rocked a goatee?
John Coogan 23:52 ↗
Never. Not once. There was a handlebar mustache phase amongst the crew when we were in our early 20s, but I don't know if I fully participated.
Jordi Hays 24:04 ↗
Yeah.
John Coogan 24:04 ↗
Which one's that? That's the Index, right? That's an older one.
Jordi Hays 24:08 ↗
I think we need to send VR to Dagestan. Yeah.
John Coogan 24:12 ↗
A few years and forget. Um, you just want to get it out of here. Send to Dagestan for a few years and forget. The really interesting thing is that Palmer Luckey revealed that Apple had done all this work to pull forward the display technology so that the Apple Vision Pro had really high resolution, and it still has the highest resolution, like the best screen of any VR headset really. The Steam Frame, two years later, is still using the same pixel density as the Meta Quest 3S or something like that. So, like even though we've had two years of progress on everything, the actual display fidelity hasn't gotten there. Leads me to believe that these people just don't think it matters because Apple solved that and it still wasn't enough. But I still feel like if you get it ultra, ultra lightweight, really good integration with key media partners like Xbox and Apple TV movies, and you have a great display that's super light because people just didn't like the heaviness and the expense of the Apple Vision Pro, there's something there. But no one really — no, I'm the only one that thinks that.
Let me tell you about Figma Agents Meet the Canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. Tyler, did you see Shaquille O'Neal at the Specs launch?
Tyler 25:31 ↗
I did not.
John Coogan 25:32 ↗
Why?
Tyler 25:32 ↗
Jimmy Butler was there. He's pretty big.
John Coogan 25:34 ↗
Why didn't they hire Shaquille O'Neal to promote the Specs? Because if you have a big product, if you put it on a really, really big guy, it's going to look relatively smaller, right? You don't want your models in the footage or your partners.
Tyler 25:47 ↗
Well, they could have done a collab with LeBron. LeBron's the new face of Polymarket. Could have LeBron in like the sort of Iron Man style video where he's placing thousands of bets at the same time.
John Coogan 25:59 ↗
Here you go. Yeah.
Tyler 26:00 ↗
Betting on himself.
John Coogan 26:01 ↗
Lupin Nike always. It's the Nike Specs Polymarket collab. Bet on yourself. Bet on your face. Is this a picture of Gurin here wearing them? This is — yeah, tried out the glasses. Gurman called the display pretty sleek. He highlights that unlike other glassware devices — they call them glassware, like silverware, huh — there's no tethered puck or dangling battery to operate the glasses. I saw some people wearing them walking into the event and I didn't do as much of a double take as I think people would think, given that they're big. Like, they're not that big. I think they did a pretty good job miniaturizing it as much as they could, but $2,200 for the device and $2,400 for an option that doesn't require Wi-Fi. That's a lot of money for a pretty early stage product. Anyway, and I looked, I don't think you can actually just order them yet.
Tyler 27:01 ↗
Oh, no, not yet.
John Coogan 27:04 ↗
Um, right. Well, in other news, let me tell you about Cisco critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco.
Tyler 27:13 ↗
Okay, you can pre-order them.
John Coogan 27:14 ↗
Okay, fingers — we stand corrected. Pre-order them. So, Paramount is leaving Los Angeles. Paramount is actively seeking office space in Nashville, a sign it's seriously considering moving at least some of its operations from LA amid the antitrust fight over its proposed acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery. The company is seeking roughly 400,000 square feet in the Tennessee capital that it could occupy within two to three years. So Tyler and I were doing some digging on what the plan is for the Paramount lot now that it will be vacant. And the obvious — it's just like a no-brainer. Turn it into a data center, right? So I pulled it up. You know, you got 29 sound stages. They're already big buildings.
Tyler 28:09 ↗
A lot of power.
John Coogan 28:11 ↗
Actually, not as much power as you think. There is a decent amount of power, but there's only enough power for roughly a couple thousand GPUs. You're not going to be racking 50,000 GPUs anytime soon. Certainly not 100,000 GPUs. There is a road to power. It's a utility interconnection problem, not a real estate problem. There's plenty of square footage, plenty of buildings, but you would need to connect Paramount to the more serious LADWP transmission infrastructure, but you could get it to 100 megawatts. And I think everyone in Hollywood would be like, 'Fine. Okay, we didn't like that they left, but at least we got a data center.' Well, I mean, we were also thinking about on-site power generation. Maybe there's some kind of natural gas play here that's under LA you can tap into. We were thinking, you know, the La Brea tar pits.
Tyler 29:10 ↗
Yeah.
John Coogan 29:10 ↗
You might be able to convert that into fossil fuel.
Tyler 29:15 ↗
You're full of ideas.
John Coogan 29:16 ↗
Yes.
Tyler 29:17 ↗
Do you think Paramount will actually leave, or do you think LA will fight back and say, 'Hey, okay, we're going to let you do this, but we want you to stay?' I think it's a — I mean, as somebody with very, very little knowledge of the situation and certainly no insider knowledge, I would assume that they want a Nashville HQ anyways, just because there's a lot of momentum there, as you know, just in the region, but it also in the meantime serves as a real bluff, right?
John Coogan 29:46 ↗
Yeah. Yeah. It does seem like there's a world where moving would be tough, but staying means maybe even if you win this battle, you're still at war and you're still going to be fighting a bunch of different fights constantly. Whereas if you just rip the band-aid off, move, then you're in a friendly town that wants to see the growth and is going to be supportive continuously. Um, is — wait, The Social Reckoning is in here. There's an exclusive clip. Is this a Paramount film?
Tyler 30:20 ↗
We got to figure out who's behind all this.
John Coogan 30:22 ↗
I don't know. Let's play it.
Tyler 30:23 ↗
Let's play it. We got a clip from The Social Reckoning starring Jeremy Allen White.
John Coogan 30:28 ↗
And again, this is a story that no one cares about anymore, but let's check it out. I'm not going to risk my job, my future, or my freedom anymore to help a reporter who, let's face it, is biased against tech because we're taking journalism jobs. Who does this? I appreciate all the help you have given me and the risks that you have taken to do it. You were absolved. For the record, my bias isn't because tech is taking journalism jobs. It's because you are doing them so badly. It's a big deal. Have a safe flight back, Francis. I'm not going to risk my job. I do like Jeremy Allen White. Have you seen The Bear? No. It's a good show.
Tyler 31:35 ↗
No. I'm sure the movie is great. It's just — it's just coming at a time when people are deeply interested in what's happening in tech, but not — have so moved on from the story to such a degree.
John Coogan 31:50 ↗
Yeah. But I think people are still thinking about — like, I'm much more interested in seeing this kind of story on phone addiction and — this is that story loosely. It is. And I actually think this is — yes. Yes. This doesn't confront any of the discussion of what's going on in AI. And that's probably the more relevant story. But I do think that you can go into this movie, you can be motivated to go see this movie because you're like, I'm worried about what's going on with brain rot and slop online and political divisiveness and divisions and all of the stuff. And even if I'm on Instagram all the time, even if I'm posting on Instagram all the time about how Instagram is bad, I'm motivated to know more about how bad is it? Why is it bad? What's the inner workings of this bad thing that I don't like? And so I do think this is a brain rot movie. This is a kids on the phones addiction movie. I think this scratches that itch a little bit for many people, even though it is like a much more narrow story, but certainly cinematic. It'll be fun. Um, what is this picture that is after Evan Spiegel who quote tweeted Atlas: 'We came, we pinch, we mob. I love Atlas.' What is this picture of?
Tyler 33:17 ↗
Yeah, so that was one of the critiques I had with the Specs, which is basically like the colors — there's this, it's like chromatic aberration it's called. And it's like quite a big issue on the Specs I found.

95 more exchanges in this transcript

Sign in free to read the rest of this interview. No card required.

Sign in to read the full transcript

Cite this transcript

APA, MLA, BibTeX
APA

Coogan, J. (2026, September 17). Paramount Bounces, Snap Specs, AI Affirmations, Chase Lochmiller Joins, Joe Weisenthal IRL [Interview transcript]. TBPN. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3002051/

MLA

John Coogan. "Paramount Bounces, Snap Specs, AI Affirmations, Chase Lochmiller Joins, Joe Weisenthal IRL." TBPN, 17 Sep. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3002051/.

BibTeX
@misc{coogan2026_3002051,
  author       = {John Coogan},
  title        = {Paramount Bounces, Snap Specs, AI Affirmations, Chase Lochmiller Joins, Joe Weisenthal IRL},
  howpublished = {Interview transcript, TBPN. CEOInterviews.AI},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = {sep},
  url          = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3002051/},
  note         = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}