Gen Z Hustler Makes $75,000 a Month on Kiosks and Drives a Lambo

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1:31Carol Massar:Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Stenevek on Bloomberg Radio. Speaking of cycles, that is also the case when it comes to job markets. And it's, I think, safe to say that we've got young Americans facing a different market, grappling with shrinking entry level opportunities. AI's impact on the labor market is certainly happening. They've got increasing housing costs, mounting personal debt, a bit of a full plate. And then there's the Gen Z who seem to figure things out, at least according to a story by our own Red Brown.

2:10Carol Massar:It is today's Bloomberg, actually a recent Bloomberg Big Take by Bloomberg News consumer reporter Red Brown, who joins us here on set. There's a great Bloomberg Originals video, too, that I highly recommend folks check it out. Tell us about this story. First of all, young people, right? It's been a difficult backdrop. Yeah, absolutely. I think you just kind of laid it out there nicely, all the things that they sort of face at the moment. I think there's this element that one of the stats that really stood out to me was I think it's like 68 % of Gen Z doesn't think, they think that work will be obsolete in the future.

2:44I don't even know what that means.

2:45Carol Massar:Like, how do you get your head around that? Yeah, exactly. Like, what does that mean for the future of work? You know, like these people are looking at the job market, maybe they're coming out of college or not. And they're saying, you know what, I don't think that there's a path forward for me here, right? So then that takes you down this path of what am I going to do instead? And I think with this story, we kind of found this subset of people who are kind of grappling with this in an interesting way, which is how do I make my life a little bit more autonomous? How do I have multiple income streams to have the life that I want to have?

3:14Carol Massar:Before we get into it, we talk about the people that you came across. What was the mission or what was the spark that we know young people are struggling? What was it that led to this story? I'm just curious about the conversation or something you saw. Yeah, honestly, it was, I forget what it was exactly, but I was just thinking about, no, I don't expect the exact conversation. I don't remember exactly. Anybody who's done reporting knows this, right? But I was very well. I was thinking about old cigarette dispensers. So I just took over the tobacco beat earlier this year. And I was thinking about old cigarette dispensers.

3:45Those have always gone away. Whenever I see one in a bar, I'm like, this is amazing. Right. And I was thinking about vapes. I was like, why can't you throw a vape in there? Why can't you throw a nicotine pouch in there? And I just, I think I just Googled like vape vending machine. and all these videos start popping up. I found the website for the machines that are very popular, like kind of the best machines. If you spend enough time on Reddit like I do, you start to see the top of the line vending machines. And I just started reaching out to these people and say, what are you doing? Why are you doing this?

4:12And we came across the person who a lot of this story is based off of Michael Stanley. He's a 24-year-old in Lincoln, Nebraska. And yeah, he just became kind of this avatar for this idea of how people of his generation are thinking about work. You know, Red, these stories, they get so much attention, right? People love to consume them because they're new and they're different, and then they have flashy things like Lamborghinis and whatnot. But there's also a serious aspect to people like this. Can you get into that? Like explaining to our listeners especially, Like, yeah, this may sound funny, but behind this is like a real serious business person.

4:53Oh, yeah. That was one of the more fascinating things about spending time with Micah. You know, we're on the phone all the time. I'm texting him every day. And it's just to hear how someone like him goes from, you know, he talks about his high school career. He's kind of like, you know, I was just running around the halls with my friends. It was just goofing off to becoming someone who, you know, he has this sort of genesis moment of why he wanted to go into vapes. I don't think it would have mattered what it was for someone like him because he was just thinking in a business mindset.

5:19Carol Massar:He wasn't necessarily into vaping or anything. This wasn't his thing. No, no. It's not like he's, you know, I think we've been saying this story. He's not passionate about vapes. It was just anything. He saw the margin, which, you know, it wasn't even a term that I became familiar with until I had one failed summer of investment banking. You know what I mean? It's like he was thinking about this as a 22-year-old listening to podcasts while he was, you know, cleaning up classrooms at night, right? And there is a serious business person there. And you can see how he is approaching things going forward.

5:48He's not just sort of resting on his laurels. He's taking all this information that's so prevalent on the Internet now, which I think is another element that hopefully came out in the story of this information is now more available to people. So if they have this idea, this genesis, they see that you can buy a vape for$8 online and sell it for$30 somewhere. They have enough sort of background knowledge now to sort of implement that. And he understood sales, right? He says he, I don't know if it made it into the piece, but he spent a little time doing real estate, which is obviously another one of these big sort of passive income side hustles that a lot of people explore.

6:24But he kind of accumulated the business knowledge through trial and error that he was able to kind of finally put into action with the sort of right product and the right, you know, route to market, if we want to use sort of a Bloomberg term. It just really, just really worked for him.

6:38Carol Massar:Well, what's wild too, and we talk so much about, it's not just about income, but wealth creation, right? And so he created wealth that, as you point out in the story, then he was able to invest in a bar in Lincoln, Nebraska. But then he also thought about teaching others, right, as well. Yeah, and then it's interesting to hear, again, like this sort of amount of information that's online. It's not like, you know, like everyone's keeping this a secret. Like I think this is another sort of thing with this generation is that like we want to lift everybody up. Kind of a shared prosperity. It's something I just talked about with Daron Esamoglu, who is a Nobel laureate and has a book out in kind of tying economy, politics.

7:13Carol Massar:But it all is based on the importance of shared prosperity, which used to be a lot more, it seems like, part of society, and we've gotten away from it. Right. This is another sort of interesting thing that came up during the reporting. I was speaking with an economist, and she attributed – we were kind of interested in this idea of how there's people out of the workforce. We thought this was maybe connected to that. We ended up going in a different direction. and she kind of attributed one of the reasons why people are out of the economy is like the lack of community so like when young people don't have this sort of apprenticeship program anymore that could give you sort of the this the first rung on the ladder to you know prosperity it's moved online so right these people like you know mike and mine i call it this but he's doing an apprentice program right like that's what this coaching sort of thing is obviously there's a charge for it he does yeah there's like an upfront fee but it's like sort of a deposit that you put down with the idea that we'll land a location, we'll work with you, we'll give you leads when you'll land your first location in 90 days, or you get your sort of deposit back.

8:11So it'll get you a machine, it'll get you the coaching, it'll get you the lead, like I said, the leads and a script and all of these things that, you know, Mike has sort of accumulated over doing, I don't know how many of these, these calls. But again, it's, it's this generation of is thinking about things just like differently, you know, they, they, people call them lazy, they call them all these things. And like, the more I spoke with these people that are involved in this, it was like, it's anything but it's really anything. But every generation up and coming gets called lazy, right?

8:40Carol Massar:Well, I know. Or don't like, yeah, that they don't want a job. They don't want to buy houses. But you really find out that ultimately, everybody's kind of going for the same thing. There's a stat I want to bring out applications from Gen Z founders to form new businesses has increased about 66 % in the 12 months through June from a year earlier, faster growth than at any other age group, according to a report from Bank of America Institute. And these are, I always forget, Gen Z is what? Born roughly from 1997 to 2012. Yeah, yeah. So like you can see that it's, you know, people are getting older, right?

9:14The Gen Z is like, I think like I also cover alcohol, so I know like off the top of my head, half of them are 21 plus, right? So it's like they're still quite young, but now they're starting to get to that stage of your life where you have to think, am I going to college? Am I going to be an engineer? All those things. But it seems like increasingly for a lot of these people, an option is start a business. And that looks different from businesses of the past. These are digital businesses. So you brought up AI earlier. And I had this sort of same bias going in. I was like, oh, they must be really afraid of AI.

9:45And I think that is a case, but AI also cuts the other way. I think it's like something like 50-some percent of these people say that I use AI in my work. I think the journal did a story that I was reading a couple weeks ago about how there's all these$1 million, one-employee companies. And they do it through AI. And it's the same thing. All of these people are doing through AI. Micah works with his brother. He says his brother just sort of vibe codes whatever he needs with AI. So it accelerates for them, too.

10:08Carol Massar:We learned in the pandemic, right, when so many people started up businesses because you could do anything online, right? Like the internet has made it possible that you could start a website and start selling something. And you can just do it without having massive amounts of people. Who else did you come across? I came across, you know, we talk a lot about like content creators. So Kara Torsha, she's a 25-year-old here in New York. And she sort of had a similar path of Micah, just sort of like trial and error. But it all starts with this idea of like, I don't want to do the 9 to 5, right? But she's working just as much as anybody else who's clocking in at, you know, any of the offices down here.

10:42But she's probably making more money than some of those people. and yeah but at the same time I thought her story was interesting and worth including in the story because she's doing she's classically trained in theater too so she hasn't had to close off that aspect of her life to be able to support herself financially and now she's actually able to build wealth right she's able to look further into future and then also just kind of maintain her lifestyle that she wants so this this idea of having a little bit more of a flexible work life balance has just unlocked everything for her and it's working.

11:15Did they talk to you any about the concerns they have or kind of the hurdles they face, you know, the struggles that they face, even though they're, I mean, we're talking about people who just started with nothing, just created it. Sounds amazing. But did they ever talk to you about like, yeah, but some days I worry about X, Y, Z. Yeah. I mean, I guess it's for these people, like these are obviously the success stories. So like kind of what doesn't, I guess, make it so much into the stories of people that don't like are successful in this. Like there is a, there is a, um, you have to kind of take that leap of faith and be able to like bet on yourself.

11:48Every business owner of every generation understands that. Um, but like for Kara, for example, like I said, she lives in New York. She said her first month, I think she made a thousand dollars. We all, the three of us now living here, like that's not, that's barely enough to cover your groceries, let alone your rent and everything else. But she had that self-belief that I'm going to be able to like kind of build this business into something that's going to be able to sustain me. You know, Micah, for example, I think he went into something like$60 ,000 of debt to get this going. So there's going to be people that are like Micah and are successful, and there's going to be a lot more people that probably aren't.

12:18So, yeah, hopefully that answered your question. Obviously, it's not a golden ticket. People here in the corporate world, you can kind of make what you – well of your career. You can decide to spend 80 hours in the office and make something of it, or you can decide it's not for you, and it goes the other direction.

12:35Carol Massar:I love, though, what you want with AI. Like when we think about kind of the downside, right, of potentially replacing certain jobs, especially entry jobs, but it also provides these tools. Like I've been playing around a lot more with AI and the things it can do, like in terms of generating or just images or just programs that if you're looking to start a business, like this stuff can do it. Yeah, it's lowered the sort of cost entry for some things. Like, you know, you can have your own sales force. You can have your own marketing. It's just like right there. You don't need to hire anybody. It keeps capital low.

13:06You know, some of these businesses are capital intensive. Kara, less so, just kind of needs her phone and some recording equipment and things like that. Micah, you know, had to buy a lot of money for these machines. Right. But had the belief that it was going to work because of the margin, because of the business belief, all those things. But, yeah, AI has definitely kind of lowered that barrier to entry.

13:27Carol Massar:Are you Gen Z? No. Okay. Just missed it. Good stuff. Fred Brown, he is a consumer reporter at Bloomberg News, really covers some fun stuff and does some really fun deep dives. Highly recommend. It's been a recent Bloomberg Big Take. There's an originals video on it, so check it out at Bloomberg.com and also on the Bloomberg.

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