How I Replaced My 9-5 Salary With Claude AI + YouTube In 6 Months

In about six months, I replaced my entire nine to five salary with YouTube. And today I'm gonna show you exactly how I did it, plus how Cloud AI makes that whole path faster than it ever was for me. Because before YouTube, I was working as a pharmacist and making six figures a year. And on paper, that looks pretty good, right? But I was also multiple six figures in student loan debt. So even though I was making decent money, I was basically stuck. And about six months after I started making YouTube videos on the side, I was able to replace my nine to five salary and I was making around $10,000 a month a few months after that. Now I have a 1 million subscriber channel and I make multiple six figures a month and I've been doing this for years, but it wasn't always like this. Because I started off from scratch just like everyone else does. So in this video, I'm gonna be walking you through exactly what happened, what I tried, what didn't work and what actually moved the needle for me. And then at the end, I'm gonna show you how to do the same thing using Cloud AI, because back when I did this, none of these tools existed and I had to figure it all out basically on my own. And that was the hard way. But I'm gonna hand you the exact Cloud skills that I use now completely free and I'm gonna be raw and transparent with you about the whole thing. Not just the highlights, but the low lights as well. So if you appreciate me making this type of content, let me know by gently tapping that like button and let's jump into it right now. Oh, and by the way, all the free resources are gonna be down in the description and the pin comment below so that you can follow along. It should be the third link that you see in the description as well as the pin comment. So let's talk about the setup because I think the context matters. Now I'll show you how to do this with Cloud here in a moment. But at the time that I started YouTube, I had this beat up Honda that I drive to work every day. And one thing I'll say about myself is I was actually pretty good at the job. People liked me, my patients liked me, I'd cover other people's shifts, I was never late. There was actually one time where my car got stolen and I still found a way to get to work on time. So in that sense, the job wasn't really the problem. Now this was during the pandemic, by the way. So on top of everything else, things were just nuts. So if you look up pharmacist job satisfaction ratings, it has some of the lowest job satisfaction scores out of all the different careers out there. And there are many reasons for this that I'm not gonna get into in this video, but just know that pharmacists in general typically don't like their jobs that much and they're typically very stressed and burnt out. And then on top of that, it was the pandemic. So I was working way more than what I would usually work. And there was way more pressure on me as well. And then on top of that, a bunch of my staff actually quit, some of them for legitimate reasons and others because they basically just wanted to get paid to do nothing. And on top of all of that, we literally got robbed three times in a six month period. So if all of that wasn't enough, being incredibly stressed, burnt out, depressed, et cetera, I was also in fear of my physical safety pretty much at all times. With that being said, I still was dedicated to doing my absolute best and giving my patients everything that I could. But here's the thing, even though I was good at the job, I was still stuck inside of this little box behind a counter and I literally couldn't go outside during my shift. I couldn't step out into the fresh, beautiful Washington air. I couldn't move around and I'd look out the window at this beautiful green trees outside and all the different shades of green. If you've been to Washington, you know exactly what I'm talking about. And I would feel like I was locked inside of a prison cell. And yeah, the salary was good. I was making six figures a year. And as a kid who grew up poor, I'm talking section eight housing poor, living in a trailer park, even homeless at one point. And when I say homeless, I mean, there were literally some nights where we slept outside and then we stayed at a Salvation Army for about a six month period. And this is the exact Salvation Army, I'll put the picture up right now, that we stayed at in Kansas. And yeah, I went from being homeless to making six figures a year. And I felt like I'd made it. And that feeling lasted for quite some time because honestly, it was a really good feeling to go from being poor to being middle class. But then I'd opened up my student loan statements and I had multiple six figures in student loan debt staring right back at me. So even though I was making decent money, a huge chunk of it was just going right back to paying off the loans that I took out to get the job in the first place. And when I was younger, I'd been told what everyone else gets told, right? Go to college, get a good job, you'll be set for life. But what nobody mentioned was that, yeah, you'll be set for life, but you'll also be set for life with a bunch of debt. So I was working full time, making six figures a year, and I still felt completely trapped. At all times, I felt like there was a sword dangling above my head. Like I was just going to be doing the same job forever until I died or until the loans got paid off, whichever came first. And that's when I started really looking around for a way out. All right, guys, quick break. This video is sponsored by me. I wanted to let you know that I'm going to be doing a live training this week where I'm going to be revealing the YouTube content advantage in 2026. It is a completely free training, no strings attached. In fact, I'm giving away even more bonuses at the training. Just as an example, I'm going to be giving away my niche validator. And this is going to be available for both Claude as well as ChatGPT, which is a super valuable piece of software where you can finally figure out what the best niche for you is. So do not miss out on this training. Make sure you sign up for it down in the description and the pinned comment below because you only get it if you join the training. So if you don't join now, you might miss it. But that being said, in the workshop, you'll get to meet me. You'll get to ask me questions directly. So I look forward to meeting you. So click the link in the description and the pinned comment below. Make sure you put it on your calendar. And if for whatever reason you missed out on it, you weren't able to attend, make sure you still click that link because we might be having workshops in the future as well. And you'll be the first to know about it. So yeah, hope to see you there. And now back to your regularly scheduled programming. So I started trying every side hustle that you can imagine. Like name the business model, I probably tried it. I tried Amazon FBA, dropshipping with Shopify. You know, I had this product that I tried to sell called the booty kit. And it was supposed to be this strap thing that you put around your leg to work out your glutes. Now I tried running a social media marketing agency. I got a couple of clients, made a little bit of money, but nothing was really sustainable. I tried coaching, consulting, digital products, courses, trading, all kinds of different stuff. I even bought a bunch of courses as well. Some of them were honestly not that great, but one course that actually changed how I thought about all of this was Sam Ovens Consulting Accelerator. And the big thing about Sam Ovens and what Sam Ovens taught me, and this really stuck with me, was that you're not really trying to make money, right? If you just try to make money, you're gonna fail every time. What you need to do is you need to become the person who deserves to make money, right? So instead of just trying to make money, become the person who deserves to make money, right? So instead of chasing a quick buck, you're working on yourself. You're working on the value that you can give, the value that you can bring to the table, and the money just kind of follows after that. But here's the thing that I started to notice as I was trying all these different side hustles. Every single one of them needed the exact same thing to work. They all needed traffic, right? All the side hustles actually work, but you need eyeballs, you need traffic, you need views. Like it doesn't really matter how good your product is. It doesn't really matter how good your website is. It doesn't matter how good your offer is. It doesn't matter how good your delivery is and how good your customer service is. If nobody actually sees it, nothing happens. And the best free source of traffic on the entire internet by a mile was sitting right in front of me as I was watching these videos, right? These videos that I was watching every single night, trying to figure out how to make money online, that was the secret. That was the best free traffic online. And that of course was YouTube. And on top of that, YouTube was honestly perfect for someone in my position because I had a nine to five job and more often than not, it was more like a nine to nine job, but I couldn't quit. I couldn't just suddenly open a restaurant or start some kind of thing that's gonna take me a lot of time every single day. I had to try something that didn't take that much of my time, but YouTube didn't really require that, right? I could record after my shifts. I could record on weekends. I could batch a few videos together on a day and then have content for the next two weeks or a month. There was no live element, no need to be available at a certain time to customers. For instance, when I tried SMMA, I realized very quickly that while I was at work, my clients were going to call me and message me and expect me to help them with their website or whatever service I was providing them. Whereas with YouTube, I could just record whenever and post it. So that's what made me think, okay, this is actually doable for someone with a normal job like me. And because I could literally just post one video and it was like a little employee that was just going to go out, get me views, get me subscribers and make me money for the next 10 or 20 years. And because I was so frustrated, right? Because I'd been drowning in student debt and stuck in a job that I hated and constantly being told that I should just be grateful, I figured what if I just made videos about that exact frustration? Like what if I just made the kind of content that I wish I had at 18 years old when I was trying to figure out, should I go to college? What career should I go into, et cetera, et cetera? What if I made the kind of content that a lot of my friends who also went to college and I had discussions about, where some of them really regretted going to college or they didn't regret going to college, but they regretted the degree they got, or they didn't regret the degree, but they regretted how they got it. Or maybe they didn't even regret the degree or how they got it, but they wish they would have had a better idea of what career path they were gonna go into before they spent all that money and time on college. So what if I kind of just made content, kind of dissing the whole college and career system that put me into this mess in the first place? Because there's no way, I'm the only one feeling this. So I went home and I set up a studio and I'm using that very loosely here. It was basically my bedroom and I literally just took a gray bed sheet and I hung it up on the wall behind me as a backdrop. And that was my professional setup, right? That was my studio. And I had to literally stack books on top of my chair to get the camera angle high enough so that the bed wouldn't show up in the frame. And the whole thing was basically held together with duct tape and willpower, basically, right? It was a super basic setup. I was also recording with an absolute potato of a camera that isn't even close to like the worst iPhone camera phones or just like smartphones in general today. That camera was an absolute complete potato. But then I just started filming and there was no real schedule. I wasn't grinding eight hours a day before work and I just record after my shifts and I'd record on weekends and I'd record whenever I could fit it in. The only KPI I had to hit was, did I get a video done this week, yes or no? And the videos that I was making were all about the kind of stuff that I'd been forced to figure out the hard way. So careers, college degrees, how to save money, investments, index funds, et cetera, et cetera. But the angle I leaned into hardest was about college, like calling out specific degrees that are a waste of money, calling out the system that pushed people into hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt for jobs that didn't even pay enough to cover the loans, because that was the thing that I was actually angry about. And to be clear though, I wasn't just making videos dissing college degrees and careers. In fact, I was making videos on what the best ones were. It just so happens that some of my videos were dissing useless careers and degrees, right? And this right here is one of the most important lessons that I learned the entire time, because the single most important ingredient is picking the right niche. See, back then, I kind of stumbled into mine by accident out of pure frustration, but you don't have to leave it to chance the way that I did, because I built a cloud skill called the Niche Validator that finds your niche for you. And as I mentioned, the free resources are gonna be in the third link in the description and the pinned comment below. And that includes the light version of the Niche Validator. The way it works is it interviews you, it asks you a series of questions, and then based on your answers, it lands on a niche that's both something that you actually enjoy talking about and something that's actually profitable. Now, here's the part I really want you to hear, because everything I just described, I had to figure out the hard way, completely alone with none of the tools that exist today. Back when I did this, Claude didn't exist. So there were no Claude skills to help me find my niche, come up with the video ideas or write my scripts. But you have an unfair advantage that I never had. And I'm gonna be handing it to you for free. And I already mentioned the Niche Validator that interviews you and lands on your perfect niche, but it doesn't stop there. You can also use Claude to come up with your video ideas. So you just tell it your niche and it generates a whole list of video ideas that actually have a high likelihood of taking off, which is exactly the thing that I was doing manually back then. And I built a bunch of other cloud skills on top of that. So you can check them all out in the description and the pinned comment below. And that right there is how I was able to replace my full-time pharmacy income with YouTube. And now with Claude doing the heavy lifting, you can do it faster than I ever did. So I didn't tell anyone that I was doing this as well. Literally nobody in my personal life, nobody in my professional life knew that I was doing this. The only reason that somebody found out that I was doing this is because one of my roommates accidentally walked into my room one day and they saw the whole studio set up and it was pretty obvious what was going on. So he knew, but he was the only person. And I kept it a secret because I was making videos calling out careers and specific college degrees. And if anybody at my job got offended by one of those videos and reported me to HR, or maybe one of my patients got offended and reported me to the company, it could cause some drama and it could cause some trouble. So why would I ever tell anybody about it? So I just kept my head down and I lived two completely separate lives. Pharmacist during the day, an anonymous YouTuber at night and on weekends. And in the beginning, the income from YouTube was basically nothing, right? My first dollar from YouTube was $1.27. And I didn't even tell anybody about that one either, but here's what I want you to actually hear, because I think this is the kind of thing that messes most people up. I was not approaching YouTube like a guy with some master plan. I wasn't A-B testing thumbnails. I wasn't studying retention curves. I wasn't optimizing anything. I was just making videos and putting them up, but I was making them on ideas that had a high likelihood of success. And I was treating it as a side thing while I figured out the rest of my life. And that's actually what set me up for what happened next. So one day I made a video called the most useless degrees. And that one just blew up. And I didn't know it was going to. I didn't film it any differently. I didn't promote it any harder than a normal video. I just made the same kind of video that I'd been making the whole time, but this one happened to tap into something that a ton of people were quietly thinking about, but nobody had actually said out loud. This is something that a lot of comedians say as well. The most effective comedians tell jokes where everybody is secretly thinking about it, but nobody has been brave enough to actually say it out loud. And I think YouTube works kind of the same way. So I was one of the only ones to actually talk about college degrees and how it's just so crazy and the system is so messed up on YouTube, even though there were millions, maybe even tens of millions of other people that thought the same exact way. And the way that YouTube works is you don't actually engineer that kind of moment, right? You don't sit down and go, okay, today I'm going to make a viral video. What you do is you just keep showing up. You just keep posting. And of course you want to have a system that's actually smart about how you post. But at some point, one of your videos will find the right audience. And once it does, things just start snowballing. So after the most useless degrees video took off, people who watched it started clicking on my other career and college degree videos. And the algorithm started figuring out what my channel was all about. And the income started growing across the board. We're talking AdSense, of course, right? The ads that pop up on my channel, but also affiliate marketing, also sponsorships, also courses, all of it just kept compounding on top of itself. And the crazy thing was while I was still going to the pharmacy every day, the YouTube income just kept climbing. Like every month, more views, more affiliate sales, more AdSense. And months after starting on YouTube, I checked the numbers and I was making around $10,000 a month from YouTube, 10 grand a month while still working a full-time pharmacy job. Now I was actually making more than I was making at my pharmacy job. And I stayed at the pharmacy way longer than I should have after that, right? I was making 10 grand a month from YouTube. The growth was obvious and I was still clocking into the pharmacy because I was scared. I thought in my head, oh, maybe it's just because it's the pandemic and a lot of people are at home. Or maybe it's just because this topic is just really good now, but it's not going to be good for very long. You know, what if YouTube stops working? What if it's just a fluke? What if next month the views tank and the income disappears? And then eventually I had this realization and it's one of the most basic principles in business. If something is working, do more of it, right? That is like the whole game of business. That's one of like the fundamental laws of business. If you find something that works, just simply do more of it. And my pharmacy job was stagnant. The pay was not going up, the work wasn't getting any better, and it was taking up most of my week. YouTube, on the other hand, was growing every single month. So the obvious move was to put more time into the thing that was actually working. So eventually, after I'd already gotten to 20 and even $30,000 in a single month, I quit. And looking back, it shouldn't have been a way easier decision than I made it. I gave it way too much weight, way too much fear. But once I made the call, that was kind of it. That's when I really got to go full time. So if you're watching this right now and you're stuck in the nine to five, you've got student debt, you want a way out, and you're wondering what to actually do, here's what I'd tell you. Just start making videos, right? That is the whole entry-level move. Most people overthink this part to death. They spend six months researching cameras, they spend three months trying to figure out what their channel should be about, they spend another month picking a name, and then they never actually press record. Here's something that most people don't know about me. I was making YouTube videos as a kid at my local library on a computer that I didn't even own. I was making gaming videos for a game called RuneScape. And looking back, most of them were objectively terrible. But I was pressing record. I was uploading, I was getting the reps in, and years later, when I actually needed those reps, I had them. And the act of making videos is the entire skill. You don't learn it by reading about it, you don't learn it by buying a course about it, you learn it by making videos. Make really simple ones, even. Don't try to make a masterpiece, just post the thing. Now, if you want help with the actual nuts and bolts of doing this, figuring out what niche you're gonna go into, figuring out your video ideas, figuring out what to talk about on your channel and how to set up your channel step-by-step, and basically just get started step-by-step, I'm doing a free training this week that covers all of that. So click the first link in the description in the pinned comment below to attend that free training. Additionally, we will be giving away a niche GPT that will help you to pick your niche, because I know that a lot of people have trouble picking their niche or dialing their niche in. And this free training will be great for you, whether you're a total beginner at YouTube or you're somebody who has some YouTube experience. With that being said, if you are somebody who is very serious about growing and making money on YouTube, like you're a business owner, or you're a YouTuber who's already getting views, but you're struggling with monetization, or you're a YouTuber who's crushing it and you wanna crush it even more, or you're someone who's a professional, you don't have a lot of time, and you would want to grow YouTube as quickly and easily as possible without spending that much of your time, then go ahead and click the second link in the description in the pinned comment below, because we have both done-with-you options, where we basically teach you how to fish, and we work very closely with you to do that, or we have done-for-you options where we literally just do it for you. We're very limited in the amount of people we work with. We're very picky about who we work with as well. We only accept about 18% of people, so only book the call if you're very serious about growing and making money on YouTube. But if you are, click the second link in the description and the pinned comment below, and we look forward to talking to you. With that being said, check out this video right here of how Josh was able to make $186,000 in a single month on YouTube.