121: 2026 AI Learning Roadmap, Free Resources to Master AI, How to Turn That into Profit

Get the guide from this video (free): https://aiwithkyle.com/resources/ai-learning-guide

Get AI-Ready with Kyle’s 5-Day Challenge: https://aiwithkyle.com/join

Subscribe and turn on notifications to catch the next live stream: https://www.youtube.com/@iamkylebalmer?sub_confirmation=1

This video is from the ‘AI with Kyle Live Stream’

First aired: 9 January 2026

Summary: Alright, so instead of the usual AI news roundup, I've put together something a bit different today—a proper learning roadmap for 2026. Basically answered the question that came up in my webinar: how do you actually learn this stuff well enough to feel confident talking about it? I've curated a bunch of resources starting with the fun stuff like Casually Explained and Veritasium, then moving into Three Blue One Brown's neural networks series (which is brilliant but definitely requires your full attention on a treadmill or something). The key thing is you don't need to understand the maths to use AI, but if you're teaching it or just want to separate the possible from the impossible, knowing the basics is absolutely crucial.

The whole guide is up on my website now with all the links, videos, and books I recommend. I've also been banging on about Notebook LM again because it's genuinely transformative—you can feed it any YouTube video and have it create a podcast explaining the concepts back to you. It's how I learn now. Oh, and we got into a bit of a discussion about the "messy middle" of AI disruption too. Even in the best-case utopian scenario, the next couple decades are going to be chaotic for a lot of people, which is why I'm focused on getting a million people AI-ready rather than just telling them not to worry about it.

Watch full edited live stream: https://youtu.be/xJRVJAE7L7g

—— Time Stamps ——

00:00 Introduction - Teaching AI for $2,000/Hour

00:30 You Don't Need to Know How AI Works (But It Helps)

01:37 AI Mastery Roadmap Overview

02:34 Casually Explained - The Fun Introduction

02:56 Exurb1a - Philosophical AI Content

03:16 3Blue1Brown Neural Network Deep Dive

05:32 NotebookLM - Your AI Learning Companion

08:13 Andrej Karpathy's Trilogy - The Main Course

09:55 Best AI Books That Won't Go Out of Date

11:09 DeepLearning.ai - Free Courses That Actually Work

13:15 The 8 Levels of AI Mastery

14:46 AI Canon - The Complete Research Library

16:38 Staying Current - Finding Signal in the Noise

18:27 Daily AI News Sources You Can Trust

19:19 Quick Summary - Your Learning Path

21:18 How to Start Teaching AI Workshops

22:56 My 3-Year AI Journey

24:16 Even ChatGPT's Creator Feels Behind

25:24 You're in the Top 1% Just by Watching This

26:00 The Messy Middle - Why AI Disruption Hurts Now

27:23 My Mission - Getting 1 Million People AI Ready

—— More Useful Resources ——

Find everything else at https://aiwithkyle.com/