His argument is more durable than requiring a "bubble" (plus, people keep talking about a new bubble, but maybe thats over already?). Ask yourself, is it possible for everyone in the country to do what your friends did.

Unless they are farmers, the answer is basically "no". More generally, are your friends doing something which actually makes the world more wealthy? Manufacturing, construction, cleaning, and public transportation are good examples of non-zero-sum (and non-derivative) industries. If not, it would still be impossible to suggest that everyone could be like them.

Not everyone can be CEO of a major corporation (who would work in this companies?). Not everyone can be an investment banker (there is only so much investment money out there), or a salesman (you have to sell someone else's product to a customer). Simply put, not everyone can have a desk job, or even a well paying job in the modern economy, because these are necessarily a subset of the total economy.

By itself, thats okay. It has always been, and will always be the case. The problem arising is that we are encouraging the population as a whole to put themselves into great debt under the pretense that they will be part this well paying economy. On top of this employee creation force, we have senior people not retiring, so there are a lot of additional employees looking for jobs. Which would be okay, except that the economy is contracting a little, and there is fewer demand for the growing supply.

This is a large, complicated issue. Its a bit naive to say that people just have to work harder.