I read Tim Ferriss’s article about AI and the collapse in how-to nonfiction sales.
His numbers are brutal. Across his books, the fall seems to have gone from “hmm, that’s annoying” to “oh, the floor has disappeared” very quickly.
It matches something I can see happening in my own behaviour.
If I want the answer to a specific question, I increasingly ask AI. If there’s a 24-minute YouTube video that probably contains the answer, I might ask AI to summarise it. If there’s a book that looks useful, I might ask a chatbot for the main ideas before deciding whether I care enough to buy it.
This is slightly awkward to admit as someone who has written books, hosts podcasts, makes videos, writes articles, and has spent years telling people that long-form material still matters. I still think it matters. I also seem to be proving Tim’s point every week.
If I’m doing it, I assume more people will too. I’m probably earlier than most, because I spend an unhealthy amount of time testing this stuff. That makes me a useful warning sign.
The problem is different for us
We’ve got books. I’ve got one called How to Be a Landlord, which is a fairly suspicious title if how-to books are in trouble.
It does what the title says. There are facts, rules, judgement calls, warnings, and a certain amount of hard-won “please don’t do this, it’ll ruin your week” energy.
In a world where AI can answer a landlord question in seconds, that type of book becomes vulnerable. You could argue that the wisdom is proprietary. I don’t buy that. If the material is out there, AI will absorb it somehow.
Our business has a different shape from Tim’s. We’ve never made meaningful money from selling information. Books are a small part of what we do. Education matters because it starts a relationship.
Someone finds a book, listens to the podcast, watches a few videos, joins the newsletter, builds trust, then realises we also have services that might help them.
Information worked as the first meeting.
What we can do
I think we’re already moving in the right direction.
The useful direction is real people inside the business sharing what they see, what they think, and what they’re learning from doing the work.
We do hundreds of property transactions a year. We see deals, mistakes, investor worries, mortgage weirdness, solicitor delays, regional changes, and the patterns that only show up when you are close to the work.
That gives us something different from a generic explanation of how buy-to-let works. AI can tell someone the broad rules. It can summarise our old material. It can probably explain a deposit scheme.
Our advantage is the week spent looking at the same opportunities our team looked at. It’s what we’re changing our mind about because of the last 20 calls with investors.
That feels like the direction of travel. Let more of the work itself show.
We’ve also built our own AI layer with Ask Rob & Rob, trained on all our material. If someone wants the chatbot version of our thinking, I’d rather they get it from us. We were never trying to charge people for access to the answer.
The bit I don’t know how to solve
The unsolved problem is discovery.
If someone lands on our website, listens to the podcast, watches a video, or tries our chatbot, I feel fine about our chances. Our material should be more useful and more relationship-building than a generic AI answer.
But what about the people who never get there?
In the past, someone might have bought How to Be a Landlord because they had a problem. That book might have been their first touch with us. Or they might have searched for a podcast episode about limited company mortgages, downloaded ten episodes, and been pulled into our world.
Now they may never leave the chat window.
They ask the question, get a good enough answer, and move on. The book, podcast and relationship vanish from the journey.
I can see ways to improve everything after someone has found us, from the material and tools to the emails and use of our own data.
But the missing first meeting is harder.
Maybe the answer is to become so referenced, trusted, and useful that AI systems keep pointing people back to us. Maybe the answer is partnerships, distribution, paid acquisition, stronger brands, or tools that people actively want to use.
I don’t know.
That’s what made Tim’s piece stick with me. It’s easy to say that AI makes information less valuable and lived experience more valuable. I think that’s true.
The harder problem is what happens when the old route into the relationship disappears.
That’s the part I’ll be thinking about for a while.