Welcome back. The main thing happening today is Amazon destroying rare books to train its AI. Live 12–3 BST. Here's your Order of Play.
WHAT’S HAPPENING TODAY
404 Media put a tracking device in a rare book and followed it to an Amazon warehouse involved in processing books for AI training data.
The book was one of around 1,000 in a bulk order placed with a bookseller on the marketplace Biblio. Staff at the site describe the work as receiving pallets of books, slicing off the bindings (for speed) and scanning what’s left. Their team logo is a T. rex holding an open book.
Amazon is the second company known to be doing this. A lawsuit brought by authors against Anthropic exposed “Project Panama,” which involved commercially buying and destroying books to scan them. The judge ruled the scanning process was fair use because the books were being transformed into a digital dataset rather than reproduced for readers. Because the physical copies were destroyed in the process, no second copy remained to resell.
The value of printed books is that they contain text unavailable online, while pre-2022 books provide a source of human-written material from before AI-generated text became widespread. Booksellers say these buyers, unlike libraries and universities, show little to no price sensitivity. The owner who sold the tracked shipment explained: “There’s monetary value, obviously, but there are a lot of other types of value. There’s historical value, intellectual value, sentimental value. All sorts of things, and all of those the AI companies don’t care about.”
We're getting into all of it on today's show at 12 BST.
YESTERDAY’S MOMENT
Nebex CEO Tej Paul came on the show to explain how SpaceX turned its pay structure into a multi-generational wealth creation machine.
"SpaceX has a very interesting stock incentive plan where you can actually take your bonuses instead of cash as stock. The longer you let it vest, the more you get multiples," he said. "No other space company is doing that. No other space company is capable of doing that."
As he put it: "SpaceX is a beast. They built a real business. They built a real good business."
Watch the conversation below.
VIEWER TAKES
Join us live,
Luke & Ronan
etn is made possible by Airwallex, Eleven Labs, Polymarket, Framer, Base, Metaview, Hex, BVNK and Valarian