Episode #569: What the Romans Wrote Over, and What AI Is Erasing Now
Crazy Wisdom

Episode #569: What the Romans Wrote Over, and What AI Is Erasing Now

B2Upper-intermediateAugust 24, 20261 hr 1 min

In this episode of Crazy Wisdom, Stewart Alsop sits down with Charlie D. Becker, a second-generation bookseller whose family runs Houston's largest used and rare bookstore, to unpack the viral tweet that had people convinced AI companies were secretly buying up used books to train their models. Charlie walks through what he actually found in his own warehouse orders, why the more likely explanation is old-fashioned reseller arbitrage and FBA "bookjacking" rather than AI training data, and how that story connects to the real, well-documented case of Anthropic scanning and destroying physical books for legal reasons. From there the conversation...

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0:00

Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom podcast. This podcast is for you if you have an insane drive to find the truth of things. It's not the good answers that we seek, but the good questions. I interview a range of different guests from many different fields, all with the intention to uncover the simple truths that are hidden in plain sight. Most people don't want to go there. I go there. My guests go there and you benefit.

0:25

Please let me know if you enjoy these episodes and as always subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to the podcast. Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom podcast. I've got Charlie Becker here and he is a second generation bookseller whose family runs Houston's largest used and rare bookstore. And he's also building an AI tool for used bookstores. Welcome to the show.

0:48

Thank you. Thank you for having me. I was excited when you reached out to get to talk about this. Yes. Yeah, and you had an interesting tweet related to anthropic. Anthropic had been going through and like, well,

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