"I've probably gotten 15 calls from people in my network telling me they were about to quit their jobs."

That's Chris Camillo, on last week's Iced Coffee Hour podcast.

Camillo is the self-taught trader who turned $20K into roughly $60M by reading TikTok comments, mall receipts, and grocery-store shelves. Jack Schwager audited his returns for Unknown Market Wizards. 

He also co-founded the Dumb Money YouTube channel.

Maybe you've heard of him. Maybe not.

Doesn't matter.

Here's what does…

Fifteen young people called him last week. All of them were about to quit their jobs.

And all for the same reason: they'd bought a $599 Mac Mini, wired up some AI, and decided they could start any business on earth in 48 hours.

His verdict for anyone young and still blaming the system: "If you've been complaining the world was jaded against you and you didn't have any opportunity—you just got it."

Sounds crazy. 

But he's probably onto something. But there are caveats. And there are also trade opportunities. 

First… 

The Quiet Part, Out Loud

Step back and look at the scoreboard.

Millennials did everything the system told them to do—college, W-2, 401(k), LinkedIn headshots. 

They're buying their first home at forty. The median age of a first-time buyer hit an all-time high in 2025. 

Real wages grew 13% over twenty years while housing, healthcare, and tuition ran three and four times that. Sixty-two percent of working Americans say their paycheck isn't keeping up with their bills.

That's the deal Gen-Z was handed on their way through the door. 

And they want out. 

Of course, the impulse isn’t new. 

Gig work, creator economy, OnlyFans, dropshipping, day trading, side hustles, Substacks, vanlife—every one of those was a crack in the same wall. Generations looking at the W-2 and testing whether there was a way around it. 

Each wave found a door. Few of them scaled.

AI is different. 

AI is the first exit that doesn't require you to be a camera-ready 22-year-old, a viral hit, or good at daytrading. It hands a regular person with a weird specific skill the leverage that used to require a team of twelve. 

It's an exit wide enough for everyone who was already looking for one.

What's Actually Happening

A base Mac Mini M4 ($599) now runs local AI models at roughly GPT-3.5 quality. 

Stack frontier cloud-based models on top—$60-$165/month—and a solo operator can ship a real working product over a long weekend.

Not a prototype. A real product with paying customers.

Early proof is in Stripe dashboards, not keynotes.

Zach Yadegari is twenty years old. He built an AI calorie-tracking app. It hit $2 million a month in revenue by mid-2025. 

Roy Lee got kicked out of Columbia, built an AI tool the internet lost its mind over, and raised $15 million from Andreessen Horowitz before his 22nd birthday. 

A 22-year-old named Adavia Davis pulls $40-60K a month running AI-assisted YouTube channels from her bedroom. No college. No team.

Further up the ladder, the exits are landing too. Maor Shlomo built an AI app platform in his apartment and sold it to Wix for $80 million cash six months later.

Carta data says 36% of new US startups are solo-founded. The capital cost to start a business collapsed roughly 30x in a decade.

That's the opportunity Camillo's friends were calling about. 

And it lands on the exact generation that was already done waiting for the old system to start working for them again.

But here’s the mistake most of them are going to make. 

The "Obvious" Play Is Already Dead

Liam Ottley (Gen-Z) built an accelerator teaching one playbook: learn some AI tools, cold-email businesses, sell monthly automation retainers, quit your job. 

He has thousands of paying students. 

Problem is, everyone’s reading the same playbook.

Every mid-sized city will soon have hundreds of self-styled AI consultants pitching the same three automations. Deal sizes are compressing. Churn will accelerate.

This isn’t new. 

Every platform shift runs the same arc. 

Web design in 2001. SEO agencies in 2010. Shopify stores in 2017. Dropshipping in 2020. 

Each one minted a gold rush of templated service shops—and each one got commoditized inside eighteen months. The AI services wave is running the same curve, but compressed to quarters.

So, the question… 

Where, in the AI age, does the margin go? That’s simple. 

It goes three places. 

Each one uncopyable. Each one with a public-market trade attached.

More on that, though, tomorrow.