Bending Spoons agreed to buy the collaborative whiteboard company Miro. John Coogan put the price at 89% below Miro's last funding round and under three times revenue — a company the hosts recalled being valued at $17.5 billion not long ago.
The deal landed the same week as a viral wager on AI extinction, a new whistleblower story out of the AI safety world, and Apple's foldable iPhone Duo picking up its first wave of reviews. TBPN's hosts, John Coogan and Jordi Hays, worked through all of it between guest interviews.
"If you think AI will lead to human extinction by 2030, I will take that bet. If we are still alive by 12/31/2030, you pay me 1,000,000 USD. If not, I will pay you 10,000,000 USD."
John Coogan and Jordi Hays present TBPN live on X and YouTube every weekday, running the news between interviews with founders and executives.
I listened to the full segment so you can skip it. 24 minutes of audio, 9 minutes of reading.
Here are the 6 takeaways that matter.
🎙️ Hosts: John Coogan and Jordi Hays, who present TBPN live on X and YouTube every weekday
📰 Published: 10 September 2026 on YouTube (TBPN)
🔴 YouTube | 🟣 Apple Podcasts | 🔗 Show notes | ⏱️ 24 min | ✅ Time saved: 15 min
Key Takeaways
Bending Spoons bought Miro 89% below its last round, at under 3x revenue
Coogan said the same company was once valued at $17.5 billion
Hays floated a bundling theory: Miro's boards plus Airtable's spreadsheets, sold as one portfolio
A viral post offered a literal bet on AI causing human extinction by 2030
The terms: pay $1 million if humanity survives, collect $10 million if it doesn't
A new AI-safety whistleblower story broke on Fox News and Anderson Cooper
Anthropic separately said it blocked a user's biological-research work it could not clear as legitimate
Tailwind got acquired by Shopify after a grant from Google kept it alive
The hosts called it "such a cool community moment"
The hosts don't think the iPhone Duo's visible crease will matter
The bigger problem they raised is aspect ratio: widescreen film and 16:9 video both leave black bars
A US Open match that ended at 3:33am reopened the debate over night sessions
Ben Shelton beat Carlos Alcaraz hitting serves near 146 miles per hour
1. A Bet on Extinction by 2030
Coogan opened by reading a post from the AI researcher Joscha Bach, offering to bet against extinction-risk doomsaying.
The terms were literal and specific. "If you think AI will lead to human extinction by 2030, I will take that bet. If we are still alive by 12/31/2030, you pay me 1,000,000 USD. If not, I will pay you 10,000,000 USD."
Coogan said there are plenty of people who should take the bet, and Hays pushed back that it is fundamentally a joke — probability of doom is nearly impossible to pin to a specific decade, since most scientists will grant that humanity goes extinct eventually on a timescale of "ten to the one hundred years"
The hosts then checked in on the AI 2027 forecast against the actual month it describes. Hays read the scenario's claim that this is the stage where AI becomes economically disruptive and starts accelerating AI research itself. Coogan said labs now openly describe an "automated AI research intern"
The forecast also predicted junior software engineers would face major disruption this month while people managing AI teams prosper. Coogan said there's something like 17,000 monthly AI-related job losses but that's less than 1% of the 1,700,000 jobs that are lost every month
The forecast's protest prediction did not land. AI 2027 called for a 10,000-person anti-AI protest; Hays said the actual San Francisco crowd came in at more like dozens than a hundred people
2. A Whistleblower Story Breaks
Hays introduced a segment from Fox News in which a person identified as a former AI-lab employee argued the industry needs regulation "as soon as possible," and said he quit his job to speak out.
The hosts noted he had already appeared on Anderson Cooper's CNN show the same week, and speculated about what comes next — a company, a book, a movie
Hays flagged a wrinkle in his account. He told Anderson Cooper he had worked with "a bunch of friends," raising the question of where the line sits between a friend group and a professional whistleblowing effort
A second, unrelated safety story broke the same day. "Anthropic says it blocked possible efforts to build biological weapons in a new report. The AI startup added that it could not determine if the research was legitimate or nefarious, leading the company to shut down the work." Coogan noted the dual-use problem this illustrates, that a lot of the research that goes into building a nuclear power plant is the same that goes into nuclear bomb
Hays argued the safety debate has a storytelling problem. "It's so easy to condense a PDOM down to a single number. But I think people like stories. They want something that actually illustrates the chain of events that lead to the bad scenario as opposed to these vague things where it's like, I have a lot of authority. I have a lot of insight and 5% or 20%."
Coogan agreed real AI-safety skeptics have been asking for more of that kind of storytelling, comparing the appetite to the 2026 film Mountainhead, about an AI apocalypse triggered by deepfakes
3. Miro Sold 89% Under Its Peak
Hays brought up the acquisition news: Bending Spoons buying the collaborative whiteboard company Miro.
The price Coogan gave was a steep discount to Miro's last private round. "So this is 89% below the last round and at less than," he said, "three times" — revenue, in context
Hays recalled the scale of that last round. "Miro was valued at $17,500,000,000? Yeah. That's really high."
Coogan floated a bundling theory for Bending Spoons' recent deals. Miro read like modern collaborative mood boards and slide decks; its other recent purchase, Airtable, read like a modern spreadsheet. He wondered whether the company is assembling a software portfolio rather than running each brand standalone
Hays said Bending Spoons has historically preferred a single strong, efficiently run brand over a bundle, but that this pattern — cross-selling one acquired tool alongside another — looks new
Both hosts connected the deal to fear about growth-stage valuations generally. Hays: "It's just insane to me that this was a $17,000,000,000 company just a little bit ago," and warned some of today's richly priced late-stage companies could see a 90% markdown in three years
4. Tailwind Landed at Shopify
A second acquisition landed the same day: Tailwind, bought by Shopify. Coogan recalled that Tailwind was seen as a beneficiary of the AI coding boom without directly profiting from it
The company's survival story involved a grant, not a round. Hays credited Google, relaying what he understood the message to be: "I think I am going to provide a grant to keep these guys going." Coogan called it "such a cool community moment"
The hosts read the outcome as an optimistic case — a company that struggled finding a landing spot on its own terms rather than shutting down
5. The Duo's Real Problem
The hosts picked up their running commentary on Apple's foldable iPhone Duo, prompted by a viewer question about the visible crease down the middle of the open screen.
Neither host thinks the crease matters. Hays compared it to watching football across multiple bezel-edged televisions side by side — people simply stop noticing the seam, especially in a mode where two separate apps sit on either side of it
The problem they actually raised is aspect ratio. "But I think the bigger thing is the aspect ratio is kind of weird for modern content because we have films which are widescreen and YouTube videos which are 16 by nine and those will show black bars at the top and the bottom or you could zoom in and then you're cropping the sides."
Hays noted Apple's own demo footage was shot in a boxier 4:3 ratio, which fits the unfolded screen far better than modern widescreen film or vertical video does
Coogan named it "an anti Halo phone" — appealing precisely because it isn't the flashy, maximalist choice — while Hays argued it will be the Halo pick for people who specifically wanted something different and bigger
A viewer, Blake Scholl, made the strongest critique of the day, read out by Hays: Steve Jobs took care to explain why the iPad should exist, while Apple built a good foldable phone "without saying why foldable phones deserve to exist." Coogan said the reason is uncomfortable to state directly: a bigger screen makes a phone-addicted routine more comfortable, not less
Coogan and Hays disagreed on the discomfort: Hays said Apple's own selling points — email, texting friends, educational video — are the good use of the extra screen, and that a bigger canvas favors "less brain rotty" content, citing wanting to watch films like Lawrence of Arabia or Citizen Kane on the bigger unfolded display rather than his phone
6. Tennis Ends at 3:33am
The US Open's late finishes hit a new extreme. A Ben Shelton–Carlos Alcaraz match ended at 3:33am, and the Wall Street Journal argued in a piece the hosts read from that "sometimes this glorious sport can't get out of its own way"
Bill Ackman weighed in on X, calling it "one of the greatest tennis matches ever" that "very few got to see it live," and arguing "This needs to be fixed now. It's unfair to the players, fans, and sponsors"
The hosts read out the Journal's case that New York's after-hours mystique doesn't cover a professional sporting event. The piece contrasted the US Open's culture of late finishes — next to "the $23 Honeydeuce cocktails and the plume of cannabis smoke" — with ESPN, which the Journal said "would never schedule a tentpole like the Iron Bowl for such an uncommon hour"
Shelton won the upset, reportedly serving near 146 miles per hour. Hays said Alcaraz was pushing himself hard enough by the end to wave off the camera crew rather than be filmed
Coogan compared the format to UFC pay-per-view fights scheduled around US broadcast windows, where fighters based overseas sometimes have to compete at the local equivalent of 6am
Both hosts leaned toward simply not adjusting for jet lag rather than restructuring the schedule — treat a late match like an ordinary evening fixture in whatever time zone the players are actually in
Bonus Insights
Right after the Garry Tan interview, the hosts returned briefly to the iPhone Duo to react to an animation Marques Brownlee had posted on X, showing the screen fade like looking through glass when the phone opens and closes. Coogan called it "beautiful" and credited Apple's team
The hosts closed the show a little early for a family commitment, previewing the next day's guests — Alex Heath, who is becoming a venture investor while keeping his journalism job, plus Sagar Enjeti and Saagar-adjacent guests on the AI-safety story
Coogan and Hays argued, apropos of nothing, over whether eating the same dinner every night for a month is normal or "psychotic" — Coogan said he ate chicken and rice nightly for years
The hosts' bottom line is that a week of extreme figures — a $10 million doom bet, a $17.5 billion company sold at a fraction of that, a 3:33am finish — is really one story about things running past the point anyone planned for them to stop.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Bending Spoons and Miro (Bending Spoons' latest acquisition, bought at what Coogan put as 89% below Miro's last funding round and under three times revenue)
Airtable (Bending Spoons' earlier acquisition, which Coogan suggested may be getting bundled with Miro into a software portfolio)
Tailwind CSS and Shopify (Tailwind's acquisition by Shopify, after Google reportedly granted it support to keep going)
Anthropic (Said it blocked a user's biological-research work after it could not confirm the research was legitimate)
Apple (Its foldable iPhone Duo drew a second round of host reactions, this time to the crease and the unfolding animation)
If this was worth your time, send it to someone closer to the industry than you are.
Get the latest market chatter as it happens: