After all, why would he need to? Cal AI, the calorie-tracking app he co-founded, blossomed into a $30 million empire before he could even submit applications, so it’s safe to say he was doing just fine.

“After Cal AI started taking off, it confirmed it. I was like, ‘Okay, clearly, you don’t need college to be successful.’ My parents finally saw the vision,” Yadergari previously told Fortune.

The coding prodigy is a longtime entrepreneur, teaching himself to code when he was just 7 years old. By age 10, he was charging $30 an hour for lessons to people who wanted to learn the skill. By the time high school arrived, he had created a gaming website called “Totally Science”, which enabled his peers to play unblocked video games online with no download or registration required. The venture brought in his first six figures.

Yadeguri eventually had a change of heart about college, and decided to apply. But despite having an extensive entrepreneurial background, a 4.0 GPA, and a 34 score on the ACTs, he was rejected from the Ivy League, including Stanford, which Yadegari said “is known for start-ups.” 

18 years old
34 ACT
4.0 GPA
$30M ARR biz

Stanford
MIT
Harvard
Yale
WashU
Columbia
UPenn
Princeton
Duke
USC
Georgia Tech
UVA
NYU
UT
Vanderbilt
Brown
UMiami
Cornell — Zach Yadegari (@zach_yadegari) April 1, 2025

Yadegari said the only schools that accepted him were Georgia Tech, University of Miami and University of Texas. He decided to attend the University of Miami, not for the prestige, but for the atmosphere. 

“If I wasn’t going to optimize for the best school academically, I was going to optimize for the best school socially,” Yadegari said. 

“Two weeks into school, I’ve been having a great time,” he told Fortune in late August. 

That could be because he views college as a “six-figure vacation.” He throws parties and lives in a house with other like-minded app-building friends between the ages of 18-26. According to Yadegari, they are successful entrepreneurs like himself. 

Yadegari is currently undeclared in his major. He dropped out of the business school and now takes classes in philosophy. He still takes one entrepreneurship class, but says he’s “not gaining much from the class material” because he already has the experience.

Even though he’s enjoying his new endeavor of parties and paychecks, he believes his Gen Z peers don’t need college to find success.

“It’s not worth it for most people, for sure, even for me, like, I mean, I’m having a lot of fun, I think it’s worth it for me, the second it becomes not worth it, I’m going to stop,” he said.

“But I feel like I have all my life to make money, but like, the few $100,000 that it’s going to cost me now, it’s going to be worth it to make the memories… rather than to just, like, save it, spend it, invest it, whatever the case,” he added. 

The start of Cal AI

At 16, Yadegari started building apps he deemed as “small projects.” One of them isn’t so small anymore, as Cal AI has taken off to become a $30 million empire. The app allows users to track calories by taking pictures of their food. (Fortune reviewed financial records showing the app brings in several million dollars of revenue per month.)

Yadegari said his business was inspired by a personal quest to bulk up when he was a (younger) teenager. 

“I was very, very skinny my entire life growing up, and I wanted to start getting bigger and gaining weight,” Yadegari told Fortune. When he realized a majority of his progress was coming from diet, he started to track his calories more and eat in surplus.

But something was missing from his fitness journey: a user-friendly app to track calories He found the most popular app at the time was “an awful experience.” The lack of reliable tracking meant he couldn’t eat at the cafeteria with his friends: he was eating pre-portioned meals that were weighed on scales, and often skipped eating at restaurants because of unclear calorie counts.

After brainstorming a smartphone solution, he presented the vision to partners he knew he could trust, including one friend from coding camp and two people he had met on X.com, as reported by CNBC. Together, Henry Langmack, Blake Anderson and Jake Castillo launched Cal AI in May 2024.

According to Yadegari, the app has a 90% accuracy rate for calorie tracking. It’s free to download on both the Apple App Store and Google Play, with subscriptions priced at $2.49 per month or $29.99 annually. 

Yadegari’s financial success has been profiled in outlets including CNBC, CBS and TechCrunch—and he didn’t need the Ivy League to get there. 

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A record high percentage of U.S. adults, 53%, now say moderate drinking is bad for their health, up from 28% in 2015. The uptick in doubt about alcohol’s benefits is largely driven by young adults — the age group that is most likely to believe drinking “one or two drinks a day” can cause health hazards — but older adults are also now increasingly likely to think moderate drinking carries risks.

As concerns about health impacts rise, fewer Americans are reporting that they drink. The survey finds that 54% of U.S. adults say they drink alcoholic beverages such as liquor, wine or beer. That’s lower than at any other point in the past three decades.

The findings of the poll, which was conducted in July, indicate that after years of many believing that moderate drinking was harmless — or even beneficial — worries about alcohol consumption are taking hold. According to Gallup’s data, even those who consume alcohol are drinking less.

The federal government is updating new dietary guidelines, including those around alcohol. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, government data showed U.S. alcohol consumption was trending up. But other government surveys have shown a decline in certain types of drinking, particularly among teenagers and young adults.

This comes alongside a new drumbeat of information about alcohol’s risks. While moderate drinking was once thought to have benefits for heart health, health professionals in recent years have pointed to overwhelming evidence that alcohol consumption leads to negative health outcomes and is a leading cause of cancer.

Growing skepticism about alcohol’s benefits

Younger adults have been quicker than older Americans to accept that drinking is harmful, but older adults are coming around to the same view.

About two-thirds of 18- to 34-year-olds believe moderate drinking is unhealthy, according to the poll, up from about 4 in 10 in 2015. Older adults are less likely to see alcohol as harmful — about half of Americans age 55 or older believe this — but that’s a substantial increase, too. In 2015, only about 2 in 10 adults age 55 or older thought alcohol was bad for their health.

In the past, moderate drinking was thought to have some benefits. That idea came from imperfect studies that largely didn’t include younger people and couldn’t prove cause and effect. Now the scientific consensus has shifted, and several countries recently lowered their alcohol consumption recommendations. Earlier this year, the outgoing U.S. surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, recommended a label on bottles of beer, wine and liquor that would clearly outline the link between alcohol consumption and cancer.

The federal government’s current dietary guidelines recommend Americans not drink or, if they do consume alcohol, men should limit themselves to two drinks a day or fewer while women should stick to one or fewer.

Gallup’s director of U.S. social research, Lydia Saad, said shifting health advice throughout older Americans’ lives may be a reason they have been more gradual than young adults to recognize alcohol as harmful.

“Older folks may be a little more hardened in terms of the whiplash that they get with recommendations,” Saad said. “It may take them a little longer to absorb or accept the information. Whereas, for young folks, this is the environment that they’ve grown up in … in many cases, it would be the first thing young adults would have heard as they were coming into adulthood.”

The government is expected to release new guidelines later this year, under the directive of health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has promised big changes. Kennedy has not hinted at how the alcohol recommendations may shift.

Drinking rates fall to decade low

Slightly more than half of Americans, 54%, report that they drink alcohol — a low in Gallup’s data that is especially pronounced among women and young adults.

Young Americans’ alcohol consumption has been trending downward for years, accelerating the overall decline in alcohol consumption. In sharp contrast with Gallup’s findings two decades ago, when young adults were likeliest to report drinking, young adults’ drinking rate is now slightly below middle-aged and older adults.

Americans’ reported drinking is among the lowest since the question was first asked in 1939. For most of the last few decades, at least 6 in 10 Americans have reported drinking alcoholic beverages, only dipping below that point a few times in the question’s history.

Americans who drink alcohol are consuming less

Even if concerns about health risks aren’t causing some adults to give up alcohol entirely, these worries could be influencing how often they drink.

The survey found that adults who think moderate drinking is bad for one’s health are just as likely as people who don’t share those concerns to report that they drink, but fewer of the people with health worries had consumed alcohol recently.

About half of those who worry moderate drinking is unhealthy said they had a drink in the previous week, compared with about 7 in 10 who did not think drinking was bad for their health.

Overall, only about one-quarter of Americans who drink said they had consumed alcohol in the prior 24 hours, a record low in the survey. Roughly 4 in 10 said that it had been more than a week since they had poured a drink.

___

Associated Press writer Amanda Seitz contributed to this report.

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If you are between the ages of 13 and 28, you may be committing a faux pas: the “Gen Z stare” — the tendency to respond to certain bids for interaction with a blank look. The culprit, some millennials say, is a lack of social awareness. If you’ve tried and failed to start a conversation with the intern, or been thoroughly ignored by the teenage Crumbl cashier, you may have witnessed it yourself.

“When you talk to certain members of Gen Z, they just kind of stare at you for five seconds and form a response, and are very not socially equipped,” the millennial cultural commentator known as Tell The Bees said in a July 7 TikTok. “I think Gen Z’s social skills were inevitably atrophied by Covid.”

As a card-carrying member of the generation, I admit that I’m guilty of the stare. While working as a barista and waitress, I’ve awkwardly blinked at customers when I wasn’t caffeinated enough to tell if they said, “Good morning,” or “How’s it going?” But I’ve also been on the receiving end. I’ve seen millennials gape when I broke the news that we’d run out of gluten-free bread. Gen Xers gawked when I asked them if they’d like their latte hot or iced, as if I should’ve had their order memorized.

Some long looks are indeed malicious. My least favorite regular, a boomer with a condescending tone and strong opinions about home fries, silently glared every time I charged him the mandatory card fee. I would stare back blankly because he never tipped.

Every emerging generation becomes the scapegoat for the social anxieties of the time.

Efe Ahworegba, 19, is a content creator who has worked in the food industry. “The Gen Z stare is basically us saying the customer is not always right,” she said in a TikTok with over 3 million likes. With over 500,000 likes, the top comment expands on the translation: “are you deadass.”

Regardless of how you’d phrase that sentiment, it’s a feeling most of us have experienced. Every emerging generation becomes the scapegoat for the social anxieties of the time. Millennials who came of age during the financial crisis — broke due to their alleged avocado toast habit — should understand that.

Born between 1997 and 2012, my cohort is the first to grow up in a heavily digital landscape, sparking worries that we aren’t capable of engaging with the real world. Pandemic-era isolation added more weight to that fear. But being a little bit rude, intentionally or not, transcends generational divides, and dealing with people’s missteps has always been the price of engaging in society.

What’s worse than the occasional interpersonal hiccup is misdiagnosing such faux pas as endemic. As much as saying “please” and “thank you” and “good morning, welcome to Starbucks, what can I get started for you?” is an integral part of the social contract, so is having grace for those who flub their end of the bargain.

Holding the poor manners of a few against all of Gen Z without considering that you might stare, too, is antisocial in its own way. I just won’t call it millennial hypocrisy.