Why Books Still Win (Even in an AI World)
10 Jun 2025 · 5 min
Chris Stanley argues books outlast other media because writing structures thinking and underpins everything else, including AI. Summaries and movies supplement rather than replace them. AI itself depends on written training data, making books foundational to culture across generations.
Chapters
Welcome back, revenue writers, to the Revenue Writers Podcast, where we help you turn words into wealth of all kinds. Not just money, words into wealth. I'm going to talk today about why I think books are still the best medium and media to create, because there's a lot of different schools of thought out there. You could create your own software program, you could become a YouTube star, you could do TikTok, you could do this, you could do that, and there's all these different things. And why would I sit and write a book when I could do any of these other types of formats? Chris? That's the question, the vibe I get. So I want to explain why I think books are still a great way to win in the long run. And so, number one, writing has outlasted every other medium. Before, we had microphones for cameras or keyboards, we had chisels. And then when we graduated from chisels, we had ink and paper. And stories since the beginning of time were scratched into stone. They're painted on walls, they were pressed into clay sometimes. And at the end of the day, writing isn't just information. It's a way to transfer culture. It is our culture. And so if we no longer write in a tangible, physical sense, there's no transfer of culture. And so because books have been around since the Bible and Jesus and all of that is books that have been passed down to us, it I think that this written word, this thing called the written word, is going to be around for a long time. So, number one, that's number one. Number two, some people would say, I write a book. There's. Everyone's into shorter content. Everyone's using AI to read books now. Like, why would I do that? There's been summaries like Cliff Notes, video recaps, all sorts of things for decades. There's movies about the books that were written, right? One of the biggest movies of all time were just books in movie form. And so I don't think that takes away from the legitimacy of books. If anything, I think it actually adds to it, and you'll see why here in a minute. So, number three, writing is how we think, speak, and create. So every format you're thinking about doing, whether it's a video, a podcast, a talk, a tweet, it all starts with a blank page. And you have to write it. And, you know, the scripts are written. Lord of the Rings was a book first, right? Slides are written, hooks are written to social media, posts to copywriters. They have to be able to write. And so before you publish anything, you usually have to, what, Write it. So the written word is the mental processor that we use to catalog, store, and communicate information. So if you want to think clearly, even just for yourself, most of the time, you have to write it. It's why journaling so powerful, it's why writing books is so powerful. Because once you write it down in a format that is etched into stone in somebody's mind, it's a totally different thing for yourself. You're dialing your thinking in. And then lastly, and most importantly, I think this really needs to sit on us as AI is really changing everything. Even AI needs writing to work. Okay, so let's pretend for a second AI had been invented first. It would still need a writer. Right. If you think about AI, you think about computers, all of this, it's all built on what? Ones and zeros. That's the written word. Computers are ones and zeros. If we didn't know how to write, we could not create a computer with AI. It's a large language model LLM. What does that mean? It means it's been trained and it's pulling from the written word that we've created. And so as AI continues to grow and as we continue to use it as a tool in our culture and our culture changes, there needs to be that written component that is training it, that is communicating, because it learns in a way very similar to. To the way that we learn. It's designed to learn similar to how we do. It's artificial, right? But it's still a version of how we learn. And so no matter what, if you're training AI, you're training your next employee, or you're trying to sell a course or build a business. Communicating information, the way that humans have learned for thousands and thousands of years still comes back to that. Written word in a mini book is just a more concise version of that. And if you look at the Bible, a lot of the books in the Bible are even short little letters or mini books. We've been using mini books for a long time, and I don't think it's going anywhere. Might change the way it looks, smells, feels. But books are here to stay, so don't feel like they're going away. And it's a better investment because it's good, even if it's just for you. All right, until next time.