The only way to survive on YouTube in 2026  transcript

YouTube just terminated over 7 million channels. A huge chunk of them were AI content farms pretending to be real people like fake grandpas giving fake life advice to millions of real viewers. But here's what nobody is actually talking about. The channels that survived, the ones that YouTube are actually pushing right now, they all have one thing in common. But the problem is most creators are doing the exact opposite.

Now, Tim Ferrris has this concept called selective ignorance. And it's this idea that most of the noise out there doesn't actually impact your life at all. Like, if you don't take action on it, you just have it flowing into your brain and it doesn't improve your life at all. And so, the real skill, the real thing that separates the successful from the not is realizing what information is important, what information they should absorb, and more importantly, what they should cut out.

Now, every creator right now is drawn to this AI panic. They're on the side of, should I use AI? Should I use more AI and learn all about it and obsess about it and use it in my content? Is AI going to replace me? Is it too late to start uh YouTube in 2026 with all this AI out there? What tools do I need? There's this new tool that comes out every single week. Most of that is just noise. Instead of asking, how can I compete with AI?

What we should be asking is what can I do that AI cannot do? How can I AI proof my channel and my future and you know my income streams by doing something that just can't be replicated. [music] And once you answer that question, everything becomes simpler. It's not easier per se. It's just more simple. So this is what I'm going to be breaking down in this video. It's not a list of AI tools or chat GBT prompts that'll blow up your channel and all that like junk.

This is the exact opposite. this is how to make your channel so that AI can't touch it. And I think really there's going to be this like great divide in the future and you have to decide, do you want to be on the side of using AI for absolutely everything and just become like a fake version of of a person or do you want to be a real authentic human and kind of go the opposite direction. I think the viewers will also split into two.

But this is the path that I'm currently on and I think is going to be the most successful in the long term. So I want to break it down. So this is where the replacement myth is going to come in. AI is not coming for you. You are going for it. So, this is what's happening on YouTube that most creators are sleeping on. I recently saw this video from Penguin Zero where he was calling out these fake AI creators of like an 83-year-old grandpa giving life advice from his fake 84, you know, 83year-old self and what he wish he knew earlier and all this type of stuff.

It is AI generated people, AI generated storylines, AI generated everything about it is just fake. And they were pulling insane numbers. But people were watching this because it scratched a real itch. It was actually doing a better job than people at realizing this hole in YouTube where people want an 83year-old grandfather to sit down and give life advice because not enough of them are doing it on YouTube. There are some that are doing it and they're exploding.

Check out these channels right here. Absolutely killing it. Real people sitting down and talking. There's not enough of those. So people realized that there was this hole this itch of people wanting to connect to hear life advice from just normal everyday people and they made those people fake. That is something that a real person should do. Now here's the part that actually matters for you as a creator. The reason that some of these channels are doing good is because that creators are AIing themsel themselves a little bit.

If you are making a video that is just a copy of a copy of a copy of somebody else. If you're making a video that AI could have written for you. If you're making a video that is optimized in every single way, you're not going to stand out. If your script was or could have been written by Chat GBT, you already have a problem. If there's nothing that you're doing that's different, that's unique, that stands out. It's going to get lost.

When every video follows the same title format, the same structure and flow, the same editing pacing, the thumbnails all look the same, you're making yourself replaceable even before AI shows up. And I've been guilty of the same thing. not like the whole AI side, but like over optimizing everything. Kind of like making videos for the algorithm instead of for real humans. Like I'd be spending so much time focusing with my team on AB testing and should we use this keyword or this keyword?

Which one's going to work better in the algorithm? Can we up this by 2% here? Tweaking title structure to other ones that have been proven on on different niches of YouTube that we're trying to pull in. And all of that stuff like has its place. All of that is good. trying to optimize and be the best you can and give yourself the best chance of success. That's all good stuff. But then you get to the point where you're just re-engineering other people's content.

That's all been proven to work. And that's what AI is. It's just it's just reverse engineering everybody's stuff to make its own thing. That's all proven. Like you're just turning yourself into a mindless bland version of other people. And that's when it really clicked for me that the the videos that really work for me, the videos that tend to do well are when I go off script, when I pick up a camera and I move around my house, when I make random jokes, when I do, I don't know, like weird stuff, when I let my personality show, when I don't use a script like mostly at all, and I just I just see what happens, like how the video starts.

Like I try to plan that out and then the rest just like I don't know how we got here, but like this is what happened. Those are the ones that tend to do good for me. when I have a skit at the beginning that was just like something I thought about in my car and I was like, "Oh, I bet I bet I could do this. Let me throw on a t-shirt. Let me stand in the shower with my clothes on. Let me uh, you know, cook a hot dog in the microwave." These are all like things that you can't replicate.

And maybe AI can come up with those ideas and they'll eventually be able to make those videos. But my main goal now is to create things that AI cannot. It's to have that personality, to have that real backstory, to go through those things and connect with people on a deeper level and actually try to be slightly worse in my videos, try to not be as polished, not edit as much, not be like so overly optimized, but have real people, but be a real person that other real people can connect with.

And for me, that's when things really click. And that's actually like why I use Storyblocks sponsor this video, the only sponsor I've ever had on this channel, as you guys probably know, because I actually use them. But they have like stock B-roll that I pull from there sometimes. You probably saw a lot of it in this video. The music that's underneath this video sometimes different transitions that we use, different effects with there.

There's so much stuff on there. Pictures, everything you need. 4K downloads unlimited, all that type of stuff. All at one set price. You guys know the spiel. It's it's a really solid if you need B-roll, music, any of that stuff. It's really solid. It's what we've been using for years. But one thing I really like about them is they have like actual creators making actual B-roll that actually like looks realistic and kind of like movieish or just like unique and different.

And it's not just generic, you know, AI crappy B-roll looking stuff. Like when I see that, I just immediately think a video is cheap or fake or I just feel like disconnected. But even if it's not of me that the the B-roll is, it feels real when it's a real creator who filmed a real person, you know, doing stuff. For me, that really elevates the video quality and especially the vibe that I'm going for. Same thing with like a good quality music track that was, you know, made by real people can really help your video feel higher quality.

Just add the emotion that you're looking for. And that's something that I really like is having people feel something after your video. And that's something I always work on when I'm like scripting, when I'm thinking of the idea of like, what do I want somebody to walk away with from this video? And the music helps tell that story. The B-roll helps tell that story. It helps show the emotion that you have inside of you and share that with other people and it's not just some generic inspirational AI junk.

You know, it's something real. So, if you want to get started with stock media for one set price, check out storyblocks.com/theprocess. There's a link down in the description. And thanks to Storyblocks for sponsoring this video. All right. Now, I want to show you some examples of things that AI just cannot do. And one example here is my boy Colt Kerwin. Uh he is a filmmaker in New York. just a a young dude going for it.

And I want to show you some of his videos that like literally AI cannot ever take this dude over. Same thing with Casey Neistat. Same thing with people like Peter McKennon. Uh same thing with hopefully this channel is like AI can just not replicate this stuff. So here, let me show you. He's got like 180,000 subscribers right now. He's got a bunch of videos that pop off. But one video in particular was like I chased my dreams for one year.

This is what happened. AI cannot make that video. It can make that video. It's not going to be nearly as good as this. That screenshot, look at this. The thumbnail is literally just a screenshot of him in New York. It is a real authentic thing. It's that thing that I've been talking about in these other videos of a real person doing real thing. These are just screenshots. They're authentic looking. They're real. And this is a real dude making highquality stuff.

Real shots. AI can can make this. is not going to have that same emotion as a filmmaker filming things, telling this story. Uh, shots like this, it's just not going to be able to happen. The combination of all of it is how you make yourself a character in a movie and then people watch Colt for a lot of reasons. Colt, if you're watching this, uh, I watch you personally because I I I see you as a character in a movie almost.

Obviously, not not always cuz like I kind of like I've actually been to his place. Shout out Shervin. But like stuff like this is because he is a real authentic person doing something different. He's putting really high effort in into a video doing things that you're not going to see anywhere else. And he is like a character in a movie that you're following along his coming of age story. You're following along um his his kind of journey as he started I wonder how long he's been going.

Nine years ago started making just random stuff. And now most recently he did a I built my dream workshop in New York City. Again, just a picture of him doing something physical that can't be replicated, putting a lot of effort into each video. He's only posting once a month, once every other month, like not even posting all that often, but because he's putting so much effort, so much story into each video, they're getting hundreds of thousands of views, which is super cool.

If we go over to his girlfriend, Life of Rizza, kind of doing a similar vibe. If we look at oldest videos 9 years ago, yet again, making videos for a really long time, and then she found what clicked about 5 years ago, was it? And then really just over the past couple years, it's been really popping off. She's jumped up to a million subscribers with 67 videos. But these are real stories that she is telling. Like if you watch these, these are like a mil movie, like a film.

They are so unique and different and story driven and emotion driven and honest and raw. I really feel like this is what is going to separate those people. It's the people going for a walk, holding their camera for a 10-minute uncut thing about their opinion on something. It is the people who are making short movies about their lives and real things that normally people wouldn't share. This is going to be something that sticks for a really long time because now you have that emotional connection with somebody that you care about their life updates.

You care about their stories that they're telling and and so interesting even the way she's treating this. It's season 2 episode 5. She's turned her life into a TV show. So that once you start watching you want to continue to see what she does in her life. And then when you have a mindset shift that changed your 20s, you can get a million views on that because it's an actual person with an actual mindset shift that actually changed their 20s.

And you're not just going to have this oneoff thing and then you feel burned afterwards cuz you watched AI, but you have this longstanding thing where people now start to care about you. And so I really think that there are like five things that AI cannot replace. One is a specific experience. Like AI can make a book review about any book ever. It can summarize stuff. What it can't do is give personal stories about how this affected me when I was cleaning office buildings and, you know, kind of like change my mindset on stuff because it hasn't had those real experiences.

It can make them up, but like it can't put real life experiences into things that are actually going to connect with people in the same way because they're actually real. That's one of the reasons I like to use a lot of stories or even my own opinions. Like you could go check out Colt's channel and stuff, but some people watch cuz they actually care about my opinion on Colt's channel. And sometimes you watch people who review games or other things or movies or whatever because you actually care about that person's opinion and their experience watching that movie and that's why you watch them.

AI can't also have the realistic unprofessional delivery. Like AI can't do a lot of things that like you just wouldn't expect because it doesn't have the same personality. Maybe it'll have that in some point, but like there's a lot of things especially right now that we could do that are just like original to your own brain. And that's why you don't want to be simple. You don't want to do the same thing all the time.

You don't want to just be very super basic. You want to be like, "What makes me and my personality? How can I let my personality shine through this?" It also doesn't have real stakes. You can't go on America's worst plane ride and actually be sleepdeprived in Austria until you go to California and then uh land in Disney World somehow with your friend. Like that is an experience that AI cannot replicate. My personal experience going through that with my friend. it can't have the same consequences if if I say something controversial, people attack me personally uh for that thing like saying that maybe you shouldn't have a pet if you're in debt, things like that.

Got a lot of kickback, but it's because actually have original ideas. It also can't have the same evolving perspective. Again, another reason that I follow people like Colt or someone like that is you see them grow and their their opinions change. If you look back at the beginning of my channel, my opinions have changed and shifted based on my own experiences that are different than other people's. And some people, especially on my main channel, because the experiences I've gone through, because of the things that I have done have made me different than something generic.

And while you could train it off those things, like it's not going to be the same as someone who has actually lived those experiences, who actually has, you know, a family, who actually started businesses, who actually did whatever, the level of trust is not the same with someone who actually hasn't done that and actually showed them going through that physically in like a super raw, unprofessional way. Then, of course, there's like the community in the relationship.

Now, AI girlfriends and all that are a thing, but you know, it's not the same as when you watch somebody live streaming, as when you get in a community, you get on a phone call with somebody, you message somebody on Instagram, they message you back, you see them like your comment. Like, I remember watching one of my favorite YouTubers at the time, like 6 years ago, Graham Stefen, and he like liked one of my comments when I was like just starting.

I had like a thousand subscribers, and I comment on one of his videos, and he like dropped a heart or a like or something. I was like, "Wow, that's a real person reacting to me. You're not going to get that same type of feeling when you meet somebody in person. You meet your favorite creator in person. You get this like cool vibe like, "Dude, I watch your stuff. I'm like like I feel connected with you. I feel like I know you already." And it's like a very different relationship than with an AI.

Like people know that that AI is not real. Some of them are like way down the rabbit hole. But for the most part, you're never going to get that same connection that you would with a real person. So, you got to ask, how can I have community? How can I answer the comments in like a super realistic way? How can I go on live streams so that people see me as a real person for hours at a time to build that connection? How can I answer people's, you know, comments and DMs?

How can I make my own community? Like, what can I do to build relationships in this world that is now like fake relationships? How can we build real ones that impact people's lives? So, that's the main thing that I am seeing right now. There's going to be a lot more AI slop coming up, a lot more fake AI stuff. It's going to get better and better and better. And so, you got to ask like what makes you different? What makes you non-generic?

What's your story that makes you different? What's your thing? They're like, "Oh, that's the guy who's the minimalist guy with crazy hair who loves coffee." Like, what's your thing that when people see you, they can be like, "Ah, that's that guy." What makes you different? What makes you unique? How can you be unprofessional? Can you go sit outside in the woods? Can you have snowballs thrown at your face the entire time?

Like, can you carry your camera around? Like, what can you do that is different than AI can do? I'm going to be hosting a workshop this weekend. It's the last one I'm doing for a while. explaining a lot of this stuff, how to stand out on YouTube, and most importantly, I think, how to actually start making money as like a normal person making normal content uh on YouTube. How I made $2,900 on the first video on a brand new channel.

There's a link down below. It's totally free to join if you do want to check that out. Also have some other resources down there. So, if you're interested, I'll see you