We all love connecting over a video call a quick text or that group chat that literally never sleeps. AT&T's got a deal worth texting the group about. Right now at AT&T, you can get the new iPhone 18 Pro for $0 with eligible trading. It has the ultimate Pro camera system and big leap in battery life so you can turn this deal into a long-lasting connection. Connecting changes everything. Requires trade-in of $230 or more an eligible plan. Comes and restrictions apply, subject to change, visit an AT&T store for details. Good morning for Daily Show, I'm Neil Freiman. I'm Toby Howell. Today, Anthropic warned of existential risk to humanity in its highly anticipated IPO filing. Then dictionary.com's word of the year is, you know what, I'm going to make you wait for it. It's Tuesday, October 27th, let's ride. So this is pretty funny. The topics that come up at the most local government meetings across the country, data centers, number two, Pickleball number one. The investor Turner Novak spotted this on the website Hamlet, which tracks town meetings and reveals where people stand on the issues and where do people stand on Pickleball? Overwhelmingly four. In the 468 places where it came up, more than 1100 people made comments in favor of their city building Pickleball courts, which is 89 speaking out against. Maybe it's not that controversial. Let's hear it for Pickleball ladies and gentlemen. Get some of mine, but I'm glad it's getting, you know, some good press in town and meetings. All I'm seeing is a solution where we put Pickleball courts on top of data centers, Neil. So then they can take up a lot of energy space and sound knowing too. But I've come up with a way to solve the sound issue as well. Put them inside data centers, but watch out, diving for a ball, there's expensive GPUs everywhere. Just get rid of the Nvidia chips and just put courts in. I think that's perfect. Big buildings full of Pickleball courts, no more data centers, all Pickleball. That is a platform I think I can run for mayor on right there. And now we're from our sponsor, Liberty Mutual. Neil, I want to pitch a new segment idea where I share bird facts that everyone should know. For example, did you know that EMUs are the second largest birds in the world and that they're the only birds with calf muscles? Well, no, I didn't know any of that. And I bet you also didn't know that lemoo EMU is the only bird that helps people save on car and home insurance. No, I knew that one Liberty Mutual customizes your car and home insurance to save you money. Their team, including Lemoo and Doug, really go above and beyond to find your savings. Start your quote at LibertyMutual.com. That's LibertyMutual.com. The big one is here in Thropic, officially filed its S1 paperwork with the SEC yesterday. Starting up their books to the public so everyone can see the exact numbers of the companies sitting at the apex of the AI ecosystem. And the numbers are gaudy and Thropic brought in $16.3 billion in revenue in the first six months of the year, a more than 1,300% jump from the same period last year. They also showed a massive $80 billion paper loss, though much of that was in the accounting charge related to how their bonds are valued. Ironically for an IPO that is targeting evaluation between $1.5 and $2 trillion, and Thropic chose the diminutive ant as its ticker. And ant thinks dangers abound. The company devoted a whopping 94 pages nearly a quarter of its entire filing to laying out risk factors. The company touches on things you'd expect like geopolitical risks posed to chip suppliers in Taiwan. But then it gets very traumatic, saying Anthropic could quote, "Pose catastrophic or existential risk to humanity," or could create systems that resists shut down, and mentioned that nearly everything but stopped short of explicitly referencing SkyNet. Big picture and Thropic sits at the tip of an enormous AI spending pyramid involving chip makers, data centers, energy companies, and startups. But it's entering the market at a shaky time for all of the above. Citadel founder Ken Griffin said AI investors are almost certainly in a bubble, while the Nasdaq recently experienced its largest decline since June. I think a New York Times article sums it up, "Well, what's writing on Anthropics market debut? Nearly everything. Neil, I don't think they're being dramatic." No, this thing clocked in at nearly 240,000 words. That is longer than every single Harry Potter book except one. It's longer than even Dune. Of course, like most people, I immediately opened this thing and control F to the risk factor section. It was extremely long. I kept scrolling and I was like, "This thing is still going, but there was a lot of boilerplate risk stuff, like other IPOs, and then there was some stuff that made you stop your scroll and go, wait, what? Like this quote, "There could be catastrophic AI-related incidents that could be so damaging that the insurance industry in the aggregate may not be able to cover it." And then to top it all off, they talked about the fact that all of the risks they face are interconnected and make compound or trigger cascading adverse effects across our business, which could amplify their overall impact. So, when you're looking at anthropics, IPO filing, you see some things that you may not see in other companies. It was very funny to see which risks people glombed onto on social media. Another one was anthropic outlines of disproportionately or selectively, or being disproportionately or selectively targeted due to its positions on AI safety, and everyone was like, "Trump kind of hates us, and we might be attacked by the federal government when we go public, so just keep that in mind as well." I do want to talk about the money side of things because that's what an S1 filing does. It really gives you a picture of the health of this business, and this is a pretty healthy business. It is really good at making money from customers, and especially making those customers pay more. There's this stat or this metric called net revenue retention, and it's about 900% for anthropic. What does that mean? That means existing customers spend roughly nine times what they did a year ago. So once you're hooked on clawed, once you're hooked on anthropic, you tend to start paying more, and we saw that customers paying $100,000 a year went from $950 to about 11,900 over the last year. Also about 250 customers pay over $10 million, so it's seeing insane revenue growth from kind of that middle pack of $100,000 a year, but also it's doing very well at the top end too with 250 customers paying a lot of money. Another thing that the S1 filing elucidates about a company is not only its financials, but its governance structure which is critically important, what's it becomes, a public company, and let's just say for anthropic, this isn't power to the people. This is power to the founders. Anthropics started in 2021 when seven people working at OpenAI left that company and started a new one that was more focused on safety, and it's led by two siblings, Dario Amade, the CEO, and President, his sister, Daniela Amade, and what they did with the governance structure is basically these seven co-founders are going to control the entire company through one golden share of super-voting stock. If you are a shareholder, you want to buy into this company, typically when you buy into a company, it gives you, it confers on you, voting shares, so when they have their annual meeting and they say we want to pay our CEO this much or we want to take this action, you have a say. When it comes to anthropic and we saw this similarly with Meadow, with Mark Zuckerberg's role, you will not have a say, they control 51%, 50.1%, that point one is critically important of the voting powder of the company's outstanding share. When you're talking about the future of humanity, all these existential risks, everything that anthropic is going to do that could determine the course of human society, it's going to be concentrated in these seven people, and these seven people are going to be incredibly rich. Already, they are each worth over $13 billion. Once this company goes public, at who knows what valuation, $1.5 trillion, $1.75 trillion, they're only going to get richer. So we mentioned the risks, we mentioned who controls the company, we mentioned how it's doing, making money, but one thing we haven't mentioned is how much it plans to spend, that was another thing that people were very curious to see, and they have a lot of compute committed. I saw a range of kind of estimates of what it is, but the number I'm going to throw out there is it has $518 billion in compute commitments, SpaceX is promises to pay $120 billion. I mean, we haven't even mentioned SpaceX as the other gigantic IPO we had this year, but anthropic plans to utilize their GPU clusters that they've set up and pay them $120 billion. Its next biggest compute partner, Google 114 billion, Amazon at plans to pay $110 billion, Microsoft 44, and then another smaller company, NScale $44 billion. So when you talk about circular deals and the fact that everything in the AI ecosystem is interconnected, anthropic is very much at the center of it. If it cannot pay those compute contracts that it has signed, then that's where you start to see signs of shakiness in the entire AI ecosystem. So that's why we're saying it is of the utmost importance because it supports basically every single other company and their revenue as well. Just a fascinating document that will certainly go down in business history. The IPO is coming. I think the week of November 9th or somewhere in the middle of November, perhaps unless things absolutely collapse after the midterms are before that. So we will see, but yeah, the next big step here is anthropic's actual IPO. One final funny tidbit is that Axios went to the major models out there and asked, "Claude, what did you invest in this IPO?" And Claude said, unsurprisingly, "Yes, it would invest at a quote sensible price." And then they asked opening eyes, GPT 6.1, and it said, "No, inside a huge spending commitment." So kind of funny where the AI models actually ended up putting their flag in the ground to come to this gigantic IPO. Moving on, Audi's guys.
Georgia on its mind. But not everyone in its home country of Germany is happy about it. A few days ago, the luxury automaker said it will build its first ever auto plant in the United States, a $4 billion project in making Georgia expected to create 4,500 jobs. CEO Gernodolner said a factor fueling the decision was tariffs. Audi lost $1.3 billion in profits last year due to Trump's trade barriers. But he also pointed to Audi's quote "structural competitive problem in America. He hopes to remedy by limiting things like currency fluctuations and potential supply chain disruptions." Sure, that all makes sense. But as the way donor went about announcing the project, that's ruffling a bunch of feathers back in Germany, where the Volkswagen owned brand is based. On Saturday night, donor appeared alongside President Trump at a midterm rally in Georgia, where Trump wanted to highlight the win as Republicans face tight races there. The head of Germany's top union said the appearance "violated Audi's guidelines that require political neutrality ahead of elections," while another German auto expert called him "mini Elon Musk" for co-sing up to the president. Audi reportedly made an exception to those rules to pave the way for the CEO's rally speech, because it's got bigger fish to fry. With sales in China tanking from local competition, it's looking to the U.S. market and specifically selling us bigger flashier SUVs to kickstart growth. Toby, from the reaction to Germany, you think the devil went down to Georgia? It had to do this. It is not necessarily something that they love from an optical perspective, because again, when you're bringing all these jobs and hyping up this factory in Georgia, while you are simultaneously laying off people in your domestic Germany, that is not a good look, whatsoever. But you just look at the stats. You mentioned that China is falling apart for Audi. It really is. China sales are down 19 percent year over year. Same thing is happening in America, though. Audi sold roughly 165,000 vehicles in the U.S. last year. That is down 16 percent from 2024. So it's in this rock in a hard place. It needs to figure out one of those two auto markets, because those are the two biggest auto markets in the world. It decide we're going to go with America and make a big push here. Is it going to be the right push? Who knows? I do like their idea of saying, "Hey, we got to roll out our largest SUV ever. If we are going to make a bigger impact in the market." So the Q9 is coming. It's built specifically with American buyers in mind. But when you're in between a rock in a hard place, it's opted for the rock, I guess, in this instance, which is America and Trump. And one other thing I want to talk about is just the south, not becoming an auto powerhouse. It already is. And if you've driven through the southeast, I mean, you are on any highway, you are going to see just the biggest auto plant from a foreign company that you've ever seen. Audi was actually the last major German brand to not have a factory in the United States specifically in the South. And now they're going to have one. I mean, I'm just thinking about where sports teams in the South play. Like the Titans play at Nissan Stadium, the Falcons, Atlanta Falcons, play at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, Georgia Tech plays at Hyundai Field. These foreign automakers are just establishing routes in the South and making it much bigger than Detroit was back in the day as an auto production powerhouse. So it's not surprising that Audi is coming to the United States, and it's not surprising that they're going to Georgia. Up next, Instagram doesn't just want you to watch a short clip from your favorite podcast. It hopes you stay for the whole thing. Yesterday, the platform rolled out a test of features, a new feature that brings long-form horizontal video to the platform. And by long form, I mean up to 90 minutes. It's part of a mad dash to compete with YouTube, TikTok, and Netflix to win the battle for your television. Instagram head Adam Miserie has been hesitant for years about adding long-form video worrying correctly, that it would accelerate Instagram's pivot from a place to connect with friends to a place you possibly consume content from creators. But now he says he views long form and short form as symbiotic, able to work hand in hand. The way this manifests is that you might see a clip on Reels from a podcast or comedian you enjoy and instead of heading to YouTube to watch the entire episode or set, you click in and are able to stay within the Instagram app. Adding the opportunity to watch longer videos isn't a want, but a necessity for Instagram as it competes for eyeballs and creators with YouTube and TikTok as all three want to be known as the next TV. Toby, seems like a no brainer. It seems like a no brainer, but it also seems like we've seen this before from Instagram. If you go back to 2018 and rolled out IGTV for longer form content, if you don't remember that I don't fault you, it was one of the least used features on the app and eventually they ditched it from the home screen because no one really loved the UI experience. It was very clunky to go from the normal, you know, Instagram scrolling to this big TV. But the fact that Reels has just become so popular means that one, their algorithm is a lot more dialed in. I was reading what Rachel Cardin, she's a social media strategist, has a great newsletter. What she had to say about this and she pointed out that people are just much more used to consuming longer form content on Instagram than they've ever been before. She mentioned and screenshot it in an NPR video that is 16 minutes in 50 seconds long that had over a million views. People are loving this long form content because they are, I don't know, it's just is surfacing good stuff. They've put a lot of effort into their algorithm and now the fact that you get served a longer video doesn't as jarring to people anymore. So I think it's uniquely position in this moment to dip a toe back into the world that YouTube dominates and see if it can make an impact where it is failed in the past before. And ultimately they don't want you to watch this content on your phone. They want you to put it on your actual television in your house. Last year, Instagram launched an Instagram for TV app with Amazon Fire TV platform. But then that's expanded to include Subamsung and Google TV. And then it is about to launch or launched yesterday on Apple TV in the US. So they are expanding now. They're now because this is the next frontier. They want to compete with YouTube. People already watch more YouTube on their actual TVs than they do on mobile or any other platform and YouTube has rolled out all these tools for creators that allow them to create long form content. The type of kind you would want to watch on your television. So that's the next frontier here. That's why Instagram is allowing creators now to post videos of up to 90 minutes long. They're trying to own the full stack. They're trying to say to creators, you can launch your entire media ecosystem on our platform alone because Reels is your discovery. That's your short form clip engine. Then you have features, which is your podcast in the long form shows that end up on TVs. You have Instagram live. If you want to go live with people, there's Instagram for TV when you want to eventually do put it on the TV. So they're saying like, you don't actually need YouTube anymore. You can just come to us and our warm embrace and we'll do absolutely everything for you. The one big question mark is revenue sharing. That's why so many creators love YouTube is that they pay out, you know, 50% of the ad dollars to the actual creator themselves. If Instagram can figure out how to become competitive there, then that's when they actually start competing with YouTube. Before then, it's a little bit of an uphill battle. All right. We're going to take a quick break and come back with Toby's trends right after this. Neil, you know how I'm always watching Docu series? Yes, and I keep telling you you're watching scripted sitcoms. Well, rising stars is real. It's a docu series that follows small business owners as they create their businesses, face real challenges and scale their brands with help from Amazon ads, from building awareness to driving sales. They document how Amazon ads helped hydrojug reach relevant audiences and scale from just a few thousand dollars to numbers you won't believe you'll want to see this one. Watch now at advertising dot amazon dot com slash rising dash stars. That's advertising dot amazon dot com slash rising dash stars. Toby, where would you go with $1,500 to spend on airfare? First class round 5 to my favorite place on earth, Bloomington, Minnesota, baby. Well, with Mastercard, Black Card, you can earn up to 75,000 bonus points after qualifying account activity with their limited time offer. That's worth up to $1,500 when redeemed toward airfare with no blackout dates or seat restrictions. They're going to have to drag me out of the malls America. Visit luxury card dot com slash brew for more details. That's luxury card dot com slash brew offer and soon terms and conditions apply. Neil, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are coming up, so retailers got to make ship happen. Excuse me? Retailers need to get every one of those orders out the door and ship station helps make it happen. Ship station is an end-to-end order fulfillment platform built to handle the order search of peak season and bring all of your orders into one place, even during volume spikes. Peak season doesn't wait and neither should you. Get ahead of it today with ship station and get 60 days free at shipstation dot com with code mbds. That's shipstation dot com code mbds taxes and fees apply. Are you deeply online and obsessed with optimization? Are you someone who likes to add letters to words for no apparent reason? Do you know who clavicular is? If you said yes to any of the above, then you will not be surprised by the word dictionary dot com chose as it's a word of the year. And what I chose as today's Toby's trend, M-A-X-X-I-N-G maxing. Maxing, as you might have guessed, is short for maximizing, but is most often applied as an addendum to another word like gym maxing or sleep maxing or cozy maxing to show how seriously you're taking a certain hobby or task. The modern popularity of the word is most closely associated with one corner of the wellness world, and that is looks maxing, which led the way with more than 1,000% increase in usage since the beginning of 2026, according to dictionary dot com. But the bones, hisling and bucalfat
Removing intensity of the looks, maxing movement soon spread its mentality to all corners of the internet. Token maxing became a defining word of the AI movement. The federal government used homeland maxing as part of its messaging this year. Even opposition to the maxing movement ended up co-opting the same language. Normal maxing advances the idea that hey, not every aspect of life needs optimizing. Neil, last year's dictionary.com, a word of the year was six seven. Feels like they sort of nailed it this time around. People didn't see that, but you actually did the same thing. It's like a sweet phrase that you have to. You get activated. I would say there's a good choice considering the other finalists that they weren't considering. Horrible. Affordability, data center, Unk and Odyssey. So when you're looking at all those, maybe five contenders in aggregate, I'm very happy that they chose maxing. And how do they choose? How do they even come up with that list of five finalists? So to choose each year's word of the year dictionary.com says, they look at the actual data. It's quantitative and qualitative. So they're looking at search trends. They're looking at social media. They're looking at news to pick up on the words that people are using. And they found that by August 2026, maxing was used 19 times as often in digital media as it's monthly average back in 2025. But then they say that's not enough just to have an uptick in usage. It needs to actually tell the most compelling story of the year. Now, that's all good. But my most important metric for a word of the year is, is it fun to say? And maxing is very fun to say. This term is very fun to say because you can just attach literally anything to the front. I think that's fairly why it's so popular because it's so malleable, it's so flexible. You can just say blank, maxing, when something that you probably shouldn't say, you can add it to the word. And so I think this is a good choice because you can say, looks, maxing, maybe that is the more unsavory, most popular term of the word. You can use it for literally everything. So insolubrious would win every year for you because it's so fun to say. I was also looking at the history of maxing because people say it's rough or maximizing, but it really goes back to the 40s the term was used in game theory. And then it was also very popular in Dungeons and Dragons. Players have been mid-maxing character stats for years. If you want to go to the '90s too, Will Smith was maxing in, relaxing. So it's not, it's like any word, like it does have its lineage back in history. Some linguists put in the same category as other suffix six to like gate, which has denoted a scandal ever since water gate or licious, which like bubble licious or booty licious. Licious hasn't stuck around. Gate has. So my question is, is a maxing going to stick around and given Neil's metric of, is it fun to say? Yes, it is fun to say. So maybe it will have enduring appeal. And it's crazy to think about, but we're in the time of year where every dictionary, on every online dictionary, every company that does this kind of thing that works with linguistics is going to come out with their word of the year, sprout social, which tracks social media trends, came out with their social media word of the year yesterday and they picked lore, which I have anecdotally seen, a ton of young people start using way more, like he is so much lore and stuff like that. So I think that is a good choice. And then I looked on Calcium this morning for, maybe the big Kahuna, no offense to dictionary.com, but Merriam Webster's word of the year, just the odds on what they're going to pick. Do you want to know, or do you want to spoil it? Or do you want to be surprised? I didn't look either. I should probably ask the audience too, but I can't, I can't get a reaction. I'm just standing for the audience here and I'm going to say, I'm just going to guess, I'm going to guess they went with like artificial or something like that. So the number one with 20% chance is looks maxing, but that's probably for sure now because they're not going to do the same thing that dictionary.com did, but the next few are agentic 12%, brain rot, 8%, which I feel like was a word of the year as past couple years, vibe, 8% and larping 7%. I guess maxing it. Is it fast enough on the other ones are inspiring. All right, let's bring to the finish with some final headlines. Microsoft is offering voluntary buyouts to wait for it. 60,000 employees, that sounds like a lot. It is equivalent to 27% more than one quarter of its entire global workforce. The goal without Microsoft saying it out loud is to trim labor costs without doing another round of layoffs, which the company did to nearly 5,000 workers just a few months ago. Microsoft, like its big tech rivals, is in the middle of a massive pivot to AI, a pivot that requires hundreds of billions of dollars of investments with the buyout program. The company is looking to save on people so it can spend more on creating the tools that can replace them. >> Yeah, this certainly looks to be the preferred method of trimming the workforce. Back in April of this year, I remember it rolled out a voluntary retirement program. That only targeted about 9,000 employees and they're mostly long tenured senior US employees. This is much wider in both the number and the swath. It is non-US employees. It's their global workforce and they don't have a specific type of employee in mind versus they're going after directors with that previous announcement. Their chief people officer, Amy Coleman, said that Microsoft is actively studying the results of these 2026 programs to determine if voluntary buyouts are the best way to have a regular reduction in workforce going forward. So maybe this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how Microsoft manages their people just in the ensuing decade. >> Up next, the amazingly talented voice of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck and a bunch of other Looney Tunes characters has died. The death of 46-year-old voice actor Eric Bowser was confirmed by his family who said he passed away at home of hypertensive cardiovascular disease. Bowser was in the first voice of Looney Tunes but he was the one you've probably heard the most racking up hundreds of voice acting credits for movies like The Space Jam sequel in 2021 and Coyote vs. Acme, which was released this year. And past interviews, Bowser said he was obsessed with the Looney Tunes characters as a kid in Ontario and tried to mimic the voices, a skill which he turned out to be the best in the world at. He told NBC News, Looney Tunes transcends all languages and all cultures. It doesn't matter what part of the planet you're from, you get the comedy. >> So he grew up mimicking these voices but he started his career in animation as a character designer and it wasn't until he was sort of doing an impression of a character within a Nickelodeon show that he was working on that they go, wait a second, you're really good at this and then he transitioned into voice work. So you never know when your big break is coming but beyond just the Looney Tunes universe he really has voice act in everything. I was looking just at his commercial work. He is lucky to leprechaum for Lucky Charms serial and then also Trix Rabbit for Trix serial obviously. So truly if you've heard any cartoon voice over the past decade, it probably was Bowser. He's just so talented and is absolutely going to be missed in this corner of the world. Finally, the wait is over Romanticity Gurlies and book talk boys. After five years between books, Zara J. Moss is a court of Thorns and Roses is back with a court of splintered harmony. The sixth book in the Blockbuster Fantasy Romance series known as Akatar. The series started in 2015 as a story about a young woman entering a magical fairy world. In a sense become one of the biggest engines behind the Romanticity boom where magic is real. Everyone is hotter and having considerably more sex than you. Moss's books have now sold 100 million copies worldwide, fueled in part by book talk where the hashtag Akatar has been used more than two million times. This morning's release is the book talk version of an iPhone drop. Bookstores held midnight parties while some fans took the day off of work all together to get their hands on splintered harmony. Neil, I read the first one, couldn't get through the second one, but maybe now is the time to pick it back up. - Whether you're gonna read this or not, there's something very special that a ton of people in a frenzy to read one book on its opening day. And I'm reminiscing now about July 2007 and I'm at Sleepway Camp. And do you know what happens in July 2007? The last Harry Potter comes out, Deathly Hallows. And every single kid at the camp had their parents send them the book on the day that it was released. So they just brought out maybe like three tons worth of cardboard boxes that had the Deathly Hallows in them. And then the kids scrambled to open up the boxes. And then we all just went to like a random quarter of the camp for the next two or three days or one day people tried to speed read. And we just read Harry Potter. And it was just like honestly, the most early 2000s bit 2000s thing in the world. And I'm glad it's still continuing with just a different series. - So you're lining up for Spongebob Harmony is what you're telling me. - I'm lining up. - You haven't read the first one, have you? - Yeah, so I'm not actually lining up. I haven't read the first one. I think I have it. - I have it, I have it. I can loan it to you because you got a long journey in front of you. - Okay, I'm excited. That is all the time we have. Thanks for starting your morning with us and have a lovely Tuesday to share your thoughts on the episode or anything else. Send an email to
[email protected] or DM us on Instagram @mbdallyshow. Let's roll the credits. - Family Mill Iron is our supervising producer. Raymond Lu is our senior producer. Our producer is Olivia Graham. And our associate producer is Olivia Lake. Technical Direction by Nina Miller. Herum makeup is PTO Maxing and our show is a production of Morning Group. - Great show day, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow.
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