The Truman Show

The Cutting Room Floor

Since August, used bookstores across Japan have been getting strange orders. Not novels. Not manga. Philosophy, law, medicine, daily life in the Edo period, thirty-year-old political memoirs. A hundred books a day out of one shop. The orders come from multiple accounts at machine-regular intervals, and every box goes to the same logistics center in Okayama. Nippon TV followed the paper trail and found export records for more than 50 tons of Japanese books headed to the United States. Another shop got an email from an overseas company asking whether it could fill an order for tens of thousands.

Nobody has claimed the buyer. The warehouse operator won't comment. The Tokyo booksellers' co-op says what the whole trade is whispering: training data.

Of course it is. Books are where humans stored what we figured out, meaning our history, our arguments, our conclusions. The internet only holds the part somebody bothered to type. Japan's out-of-print shelves are a reservoir no model has touched, and once scanned they come back out in every language. Anthropic wrote the playbook in 2025: buy millions of used books, cut off the bindings, scan, discard. A federal judge called it fair use.

But books run out. What we wrote is the easy part. The next trove is what we do.

Here's the vault I'd be staring at. Warner Bros. Discovery's cable networks (Discovery, TLC, HGTV, Food, ID) premiere more than 3,000 hours a year. Reality TV shoots roughly 100 hours of tape for every hour that airs, and the Editors Guild puts it higher. Run one year at 100:1 and you get 300,000 hours of people arguing, cooking, crying and flipping houses. Run a decade and it's millions. The editor threw away the in-between. That's exactly what a model wants.

That vault is about to change hands. Paramount settled with twelve states on Monday and could close its $111 billion purchase of WBD within weeks, carrying roughly $80 billion of debt. No AI deal has been announced. Doesn't need to be yet. YouTubers already sell their unused footage to OpenAI and Google for $1 to $4 a minute. Debt that size goes hunting for assets nobody has priced.

Reality TV is still people performing for a camera, though. The purest trove is people who forgot the camera was there. Yesterday at Connect, Meta said Muse is coming to its glasses, live video included. Since last year the glasses' AI has been on by default, and Meta keeps your voice recordings for up to a year to train its models. You can't opt out of the training. That's first person, in every room you walk into, including everyone in it who never signed a release.

Truman Burbank's life was the show, and he was the last to know. We're all being cast.

Own your tape. In case I don't see ya, the glasses will.

At COAI today: the full Signal/Noise (the Okayama warehouse, the Anthropic book-scanning ruling, and the reality-TV math) is live at getcoai.com.

Outsider Labs Advisory →

50 tons. That's how many Japanese books export records show shipping to the US after used bookstores across Japan got machine-timed bulk orders for philosophy, law, medicine and Edo-era history, every box going to one warehouse in Okayama. Nobody has claimed the buyer. The trade assumes AI training. The machine has read everything we typed, and now it's buying what we printed. Next it wants what we do: the raw tape, then the view through our glasses. Welcome to The Truman Show.

1. Inventory your unread books. Every business has a pile no model has seen: paper files, recorded sales calls, training videos, raw footage. Someone is paying retail by the ton for Japan's version, and YouTubers get $1–4 a minute for footage they cut. List yours today. Then read the "improve our products" clause in every tool you use, because some of them are already taking it for free.

2. Set a glasses rule before your first client walks in wearing a pair. Meta's glasses have their AI on by default and keep voice recordings for up to a year to train Meta's models, with no opt-out from training. Muse is coming to them with live video. Today, write one line for your team: whether recording wearables are allowed in client meetings, and who has to be told.

3. Add an AI clause to every release you sign from now on. The people on a 2014 reality show signed releases that never imagined a model. Yours probably don't either. Talent releases, vendor contracts, event recordings and customer calls all need a line on whether the footage or transcripts can be used for AI training, and at what price. It's cheap to add now and impossible to add after the vault gets sold.

Thursday, September 24

— Harry and Anthony

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