Three Million Millionaires: Eric Zwick Finds the American Dream on Main Street USA

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. It's Tuesday, 09/15/2026. Yesterday, we did a show with the moral philosopher, Susan Neiman, on the nature of evil. She wanted to understand the Trump era, and she went back to Milton Friedman and suggested that we have been seduced into thinking that we're all self-interested, and we all want to maximize our wealth. And that's why, perhaps not just the Trump era, but the general nature of the world is rather evil or unpleasant. Whilst she's a very smart woman, I'm not entirely convinced by her thesis. My guest today has co-authored a very different kind of book from Neiman's. It's called The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There. Eric Zwick is a professor at the Chicago Business School, and he's joining us from Chicago. Eric, congratulations on the book. It's out today. It's already getting a ton of press. It's getting great reviews, and we'll come back to this both on the left and the right. Very unusual book. But you're not a moral philosopher, but I wonder what your book tells us about Susan Neiman's thesis. It's not just hers. There are many people on the left who believe that we're not quite as self-interested as Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys or the Chicago School presents. Do you think that's a fair argument given what you've seen in The Everywhere Millionaire, where there are many people driven to maximize their wealth?

00:02:21 Eric Zwick: Well, thanks, Andrew, for having me. It's great to be here. I am not a moral philosopher. I will be clear. I am an economist by training. And, so when we tiptoe into moral philosophy, we probably make fools of ourselves, economists typically. But, what lesson on, the aspirations of the American economy do we learn from our book? You know, there's a version of, I guess, the stories, the people, the heroes in our book, who are self driven, who are living the American dream, just not in a in places that we typically look. So, you know, by obsessing with, the current administration, by obsessing with the tech billionaires who are sitting on the stage behind him or the finance folks on Wall Street, that are writing big checks maybe. We might have just too narrow a view of society around us, especially outside of those few media markets that seem to dominate, you know, what we consume. And so maybe we're led to believe that all of morality is sort of, you know, encapsulated in those few stories that are told so often. And our book has a lot of other stories. I don't see our people as particularly moral or immoral. I see them as kind of pursuing the business ideas or, you know, the problems they're try— they've identified they're trying to solve, but I don't really think of them on moral crusades one way or the other.

00:03:53 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Maybe I didn't quite put the question correctly. I mean, she's a moral philosopher, but my question wasn't so much about moral philosophy, but about human nature. You talk to a lot of everywhere millionaires in America, many of which were successful. You call them heroes, although maybe they're not quite as heroic, and we'll get to that later in the conversation, as they'd like to think in broader social terms. Of course, there are many failures too. Maybe some of those you didn't talk to. What does it teach us, Eric, about human nature? Can one make some generalizations? You know, the American dream, which the Wall Street Journal refers to, in an excellent piece about the book, is that of maximizing our wealth. I'm not suggesting everybody is like that. But in your experience in writing that book, are many Americans wanna be millionaires? Do they want to get rich, do you think?

00:04:54 Eric Zwick: So that Wall Street Journal article is about a few of the everywhere millionaires. The guy whose picture is on the cover there is Dick Portillo who started a hot dog stand in suburban Chicago fifty years ago with, like, $1,100, and he was a kid of immigrants, grew up in a housing project.

00:05:15 Andrew Keen: And now he lives on another kind of housing project with a huge boat and a swimming pool in Naples, Florida. So he's gone from one housing project to another.

00:05:24 Eric Zwick: He has many housing projects now and some yachting projects. Yeah. So we found him in yacht registration data, because he has a superyacht called Top Dog. So he sold that business fifty years later. We chronicle his story.

00:05:39 Andrew Keen: So he's got a good imagination and sense of humor, this Portillo character.

00:05:45 Eric Zwick: I think he's somewhat self aware. I mean, he knows he's really rich, and, he's not afraid to spend money clearly, and he has quite conspicuous consumption as evidenced by that yacht probably most extremely. As we chronicle his rise, so it's sort of he tells the story of how he got up there, built that business over many decades. You know, was he trying to get rich? I don't know if he had that yacht as, like, sort of his end goal as so much as, like, he was trying to just keep growing this business and sort of obsessed with building it bigger and bigger and bigger. He was obsessed with beating its competition. He's a tough guy. We tell a story of how he went up against Mike Ditka, who was a famous coach. The Chicago Bears just tried to open a—

00:06:34 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It's a great story. I mean, this guy is kinda ruthless, Portillo, in going after Ditka and undermining the opening of the competing Ditka Dogs shop. So is that a— was that a moral act, the way he pursued, the competition and tried to crush them?

00:06:54 Eric Zwick: No. Probably not super moral. That's sort of, like, I think probably a pretty good example.

00:06:59 Andrew Keen: Not a— I mean, coming back, maybe he isn't particularly good, but he's not evil either. He's just a guy wanting to make money and has done. As you noted earlier, Eric, your book, which you wrote with Owen Zidar, is taking the attention away from our obsession, our current obsession with trillionaires like— well, there's only one trillionaire. I'm not even sure if he is a trillionaire quite at this moment, close trillionaire. Elon Musk and the other multibillionaires of Silicon Valley, in my neighborhood, less so in your neighborhood of Chicago. Is that one of the core arguments in The Everywhere Millionaire that we've become preoccupied with massive extreme billionaire, multibillionaire, trillionaire wealth of tech? But the real wealth in America is from the everywhere millionaires of guys like, your friend, Portillo.

00:07:58 Eric Zwick: That's right. I think the public discourse fixates on the Musk Bezos and maybe even, you know, the Jamie Dimon, Ken Griffin, category of wealth. Those multibillionaires are, you know, once a trillionaire, always a trillionaire, I guess. I think I share your view. I think Musk's net worth is a bit below that, and that paper wealth, if he tried to monetize, they would not have a trillion dollars to spend on yachts, but he'd have plenty. If we look and zoom out at what we call the everywhere millionaires, this is— these are private business owners who have a net worth of at least $5 million. They have average net worth of around $25 million. We think there are about 3 million of them in the country.

00:08:42 Andrew Keen: And they're nicely spread out in your— in the Wall Street Journal piece. The highest average of your everywhere millionaires are actually in of all places, Walker County, Alabama.

00:08:54 Eric Zwick: Yeah. So this is the flow of income coming from these private businesses divided by the number of people who receive that income. And it turns out, it looks like there's some particularly rich people that have settled in there, in Alabama.

00:09:07 Andrew Keen: Of all places, I wonder if that's Lake Martin. I don't know what it is about Walker County, Alabama.

00:09:13 Eric Zwick: That's a good question. I don't know what it is about that place, but it is true that there are these really, high-end retirement or high-end kind of, you know, destination, places where second and third homes are had by these folks. Lake of the Ozarks, you know, is another famous, like, lake town like Lake Walker [unclear]. You have Aspen, but you also have less well known mountain towns as well. And if you go and look at who owns all the big houses there, it's a lot of these mainstream millionaires or these everywhere millionaires, add up all of their wealth. You know, it's more than 10 times the Forbes 400 combined. So that's not just Elon. That's all of the Forbes 400. So the wealth is more abundant. They're geographically they light up the whole map, not just four cities. And, we don't really think to look at them because they're not getting the media coverage, the media attention that the public company CEOs or these tech billionaires get, because they don't, you know, sell as many clicks. They don't sort of whet our appetite, for fantasy, or excitement in the same way because they're running these boring businesses, and they're not—

00:10:26 Andrew Keen: Right. They're not quite as photogenic. People like Dick Portillo and now they're the characters you write about. Larry Miller. Larry Miller, an auto exec. They're not quite as photogenic as Jeff Bezos and his Hollywood style.

00:10:39 Eric Zwick: I guess so. I don't— you know, I'm not gonna judge whether I'd rather look at a picture of Portillo there or Jeff Bezos on his—

00:10:46 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I actually would— I think I'd rather look at Larry Miller than Jeff Bezos.

00:10:50 Eric Zwick: I love this picture. He's given Karl Malone a tip on that pick-and-roll.

00:10:56 Andrew Keen: Right. And for people just listening, I mean, not everyone's gonna be watching this. It's a picture of one of the classic, America everyday millionaires, Larry Miller, rather portly smallish guy, at least compared to Karl Malone, of the Utah Jazz. And eventually, Miller owned the Jazz, and I guess in his own way, Karl Malone.

00:11:20 Eric Zwick: Right. He was there giving tips on distribution to Karl Malone. But, you know, he's a very successful—

00:11:25 Andrew Keen: If he's an auto distributor.

00:11:28 Eric Zwick: He was a very successful first parts distributor and then auto dealer, in Utah and Salt Lake, and, yeah, became wealthy enough starting with much less, to buy the Jazz, and he had the whole empire of lots of different businesses.

00:11:45 Andrew Keen: Eric, the Wall Street Journal in particular, which tends to be a conservative, certainly pro-market, pro-capitalist, newspaper owned by Murdoch, of course, who I guess is somewhere between an everywhere millionaire and an obscene billionaire, jumped on your book to suggest that the American dream is alive. Other publications like the left-of-center progressive New Yorker, which also loved the books, everyone's loving the book, suggested that, maybe things aren't quite as rosy in the American garden as some people like to think. What's the message in this book about the American dream? Is it alive? Is it in better or worse shape than it was fifty or a hundred years ago when it comes to the freedom for people to realize themselves and become wealthy?

00:12:38 Eric Zwick: So it is— I like to say you have, you know, you have really compelling and new data, a new way of looking at the world when it reveals, you know, sort of what people's, like, preconceived notions of the world were by showing them that data. And so you can see it appeal to people across sort of the political spectrum, but maybe they're grabbing different pieces of the story. I think the American dream is more alive than a lot of people think, but it's not necessarily where they're looking. So that's where kind of the Wall Street Journal take really makes sense to me. You know, we have this path to that a lot of people advocate, which is the credentialed labor market story. Go to get the best SAT score, go to the top college, get a corporate job, work your way up in a consulting firm or something.

00:13:22 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Go to the Booth Business School and get taught by, Eric Swick [as spoken: Zwick].

00:13:27 Eric Zwick: That's right. That's right. Those poor saps, what they should be doing is, you know, coming here, and then I tell them about the search funders that are going looking for ambulance, service companies to buy to run so they can go, you know, be entrepreneurs through acquisition, which I do have some students that end up going to do that. You know, and then on the right, you have, like, sort of, well, this is self made. This is the story that, like, you know, left doesn't want you to know that you can get ahead. But, of course, when you look at where kids come from, it turns out if your parents are in the top 1%, you're six times as likely to start a star business as if you're at the ninetieth percentile. So there's some advantage being gotten there from kids at the top that—

00:14:11 Andrew Keen: But is there any difference than the way it was, Eric? What trends do you see in terms of that? Is it narrowing? Is it opening up?

00:14:21 Eric Zwick: I think the trends suggest that it's gotten harder to rise to the top if you start at the bottom. But, overall, there's still so many paths to the top that, you know, we don't wanna mistake the trends as telling you what the levels are. And so the— there still are just a ton of opportunities, and there are a lot of opportunities that are sort of off the beaten path, in these unglamorous, industries and occupations that I think we don't wanna forget, them because they're gonna continue to be important going forward.

00:14:56 Andrew Keen: You have an interesting story to tell in the sense that your— you and your co-author, Owen Zidar, who got his PhD from Berkeley. You got yours from Harvard. Owen now teaches at Princeton. You're at Chicago. You began all this, is it fair to say, at the US Treasury Office of Tax Analysis when you worked as unpaid analysts, when you were in finishing grad school? So how did that experience, which doesn't sound very interesting, flower into this, remarkable, study that's out today, the everywhere millionaire?

00:15:38 Eric Zwick: So we, are tax policy nerds and sort of analysts. That's sort of our areas of research to begin with coming out of grad school. And so we were brought to the Treasury to work with career civil servants there to help them wrangle some of the data that they were having trouble managing or, you know, we were able to put together a new dataset that we were able to answer questions that were very important for tax policy at the time. They wanted to understand how much tax business owners pay. And the way the data was organized, you could see that people were at the top. You could see that some of these businesses were getting quite large, but because these pass-through businesses that we were really focused on don't actually pay tax themselves, you had to link those businesses back to their owners to figure out what the effective tax was. So that was the original project. As we, like, dug into that data and assembled that data, which took many months into years building the large projects that, would be the foundation for the research that then led us to the book, we realized there was a much broader story about, okay, who's really rich in America, who's driving the top 1% income share, what is the nature of the activity underlying that growth in the top 1% income share, trying to understand drive rising inequality. And we're working with data that people just hadn't been able to use before to study the rich, and powerful in America. So that was, that's sort of where it all began there in the bowels of the Treasury Department, three of us in a windowless office, newly minted PhDs doing tax policy research.

00:17:14 Andrew Keen: John Lanchester writing in the New Yorker, he's an excellent writer, both fiction and nonfiction. He's written a number of books on capitalism and the market as a progressive, although I'm not sure he's anti-capitalist as such, focuses in his review on the Tax Reform Act of 1986. How central is this, Eric, in the emergence of your everywhere millionaires? And does it suggest that the Reform Act of 1986 was a success or a failure? Tell us who passed this act, and what was the thinking behind it.

00:17:52 Eric Zwick: 1986 tax reform, I like to think of the tax code as a house that depreciates over time and needs repairs. The 1986 tax reform was an attempt to repair a tax code that was littered with loopholes, had very high personal individual tax rates, in the 70% range that nobody paid or very few people paid. However, some people that did pay it were movie stars like Ronald Reagan, who was president at the time, paid when he was a movie actor. Bill Bradley, who's a Democratic, senator from New Jersey paid that high tax rate as an—

00:18:26 Andrew Keen: And a former basketball player, of course.

00:18:28 Eric Zwick: About— exactly. His basketball salary, was very, you know, vivid, so he paid high taxes on that. But very few others did. So Republicans in the White House, Democrats in Congress got together to drop those personal tax rates and raise corporate taxes a bit to try and offset the cost of those reduced personal tax rates. A side effect of this is it all of a sudden made sense for businesses for the first time in the history of the tax code to organize such that the businesses themselves were subject to that personal income tax rate, which right after the '86 reform was below 30%. This led to a surge in new businesses being formed in this pass-through form, businesses switching from traditional form to this pass-through form. It lowered the effective tax on businesses overall so that the more profits people made, the more they got to keep. And so as these businesses grew for both tax and nontax reasons, the tax rules further fueled that fire. They became more powerful over time. You see subsequent tax reforms benefit them. The individual tax rate cuts in the Bush administration, the individual tax rate cuts with additional loopholes for business owners in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, those were codified made permanent in 2025 with One Big Beautiful Bill Act that sweetened those deals further. So you've seen the tax code kind of as a— an actor in this play, kind of continue to enrich and sort of empower these, Main Street millionaires everywhere, millionaires, and make, you know, them richer, make their businesses grow faster than they otherwise would have.

00:20:10 Andrew Keen: So there's— I guess there's two ways of responding to this. Firstly, some people might say, well, this proves that the Reagan Tax Reform Act was a success. It stimulated and triggered an eruption of entrepreneurial activity, enabled some of the guys you write about in the book, to make money. Otherwise, they wouldn't have bothered to do it and get their homes in Naples, Florida or acquire their basketball professional basketball teams. On the other hand, from a progressive point of view, people who are more ambivalent about all this and are concerned about the degree of inequality, it enabled the creation of your everywhere millionaires and actually compounded inequality. Which of those two arguments do you think are true in terms of the Tax Act of '86 or are both true simultaneously?

00:21:04 Eric Zwick: I find elements to agree with in both of these stories about the 1986 tax reform and another piece of it. You know? And I think it's common to a lot of, policy changes as an unintended consequence of that reform is some of the surging growth because it really wasn't planned at the time in any way. If you think about, you know, Reagan and Bill Bradley's motivations, it was much more to sort of rationalize the tax code in a lot of ways and remove loopholes. They didn't think of it as opening a new loophole that would then be sort of stretched further and further open over time. I do think it's an important part of sort of our fiscal problem today, is the tax benefits that this class of people have received over the last few decades. So I don't think we could call it an unmitigated success by any virtue. A secondary benefit is it, you know, gave us the link for the first time between those at the top of the income and wealth distribution and the businesses they own so we could understand a little bit better or much better what they were doing. So that pass-through tax code gave us kind of the data underneath it where you have those links. You don't really have that with traditional corporations such as we're operating primarily in the nineteen eighties and before. And so, it kind of enabled us to write, you know, the research and to write this book and tell this story for the first time.

00:22:30 Andrew Keen: Coming back to our opening question about human nature and motivation, there's another argument, I think particularly on the left, that suggests that once you earn over— once you're worth over 5 or 10 or 50 or 100 million and you deal with all these types in your book, it doesn't really make any difference. You can only buy a certain amount of boats and homes and enclaves in Naples, Florida, so you're comfortable paying taxes. Had— I know it's an impossible question to ask answer, Eric, but had this Tax Reform Act of '86 not passed? I mean, the guys that you cover in the book, like Larry Miller, and, Dick Portillo with his beautiful estate in Naples, Florida, wouldn't they have still done their businesses? They might not have made quite as much money. They may have paid higher taxes, but they'd still be pretty wealthy today, wealthier than most other Americans.

00:23:30 Eric Zwick: Absolutely. I think the tax code is something that they deal with, but it's not the first thing or even the fourth thing that's driving their behavior. They are first and foremost, these founders obsessed with their businesses. They're bad at hobbies, and, you know, they're very happy to grow these businesses. I think if you raise the tax on them a little bit, it— they wouldn't even notice. You raise the tax on them a lot, they would complain. I mean, you do see them when they have a chance retire to low tax states. They try to, you know, leave Inland Empire, California and move to, you know, Nevada or Arizona to get lower taxes or to Texas or Florida. So I think they are somewhat tax responsive when they relocate, but I don't really think it's the driving force behind their entrepreneurialism or behind the growth of those businesses.

00:24:26 Andrew Keen: Most of the people, certainly, we've discussed so far have been white men. There are a number of women. One of them one of the characters in your book is a woman called Tracy Britt Cool, who left Berkshire Hathaway, of all people, and created her own business. How does the everywhere millionaire work out in terms of gender and ethnic diversity? Does it trend towards white men, or is there more equality when it comes to, the color and gender of these everywhere millionaires?

00:25:03 Eric Zwick: So one of the nice things about the book is we have enough space to tell a lot of different stories, and we try to curate a set of stories that then feeds back to that administrative big data, like, in terms of it being representative. So, the typical everywhere millionaire is a white man in his late fifties, early sixties, married, with a college degree.

00:25:29 Andrew Keen: Very good. Very strong on marriage. Maybe it suggests that if you stay married, you're gonna make some money. You're not wasting your time dating.

00:25:36 Eric Zwick: I am hesitant to draw a causal connection between those two, and I also would caution you against inferring that it's the first marriage, that we're observing, in this data and not the second or the third, marriage, which I think, you know—

00:25:52 Andrew Keen: Maybe when they get their trophy homes, they also get their trophy wives, do they?

00:25:57 Eric Zwick: I think it has been done. I think it is an important, sort of naturally occurring wealth tax is the propensity of, certain class of business owners that are obsessed with their businesses and themselves, and they, don't spend so much time with their family. And, the—

00:26:12 Andrew Keen: Although, you know, the multi— the multibillionaires, the Jeff Bezoses of the world, and the Sergey Brins have also played the marriage game as well. So it's not just the everywhere millionaire.

00:26:25 Eric Zwick: Oh, it's for sure, divorce dissipates wealth concentration up and down the wealth distribution, as does having many children, who are, you know, less excited about being entrepreneurs themselves. But that's not to your point. So there are a lot of female entrepreneurs in the data, you know, maybe a third of the star entrepreneurs in our large scale data where we're looking at 8 million business founders, over the last twenty years in the United States come from that class. And then you also have, you know, African American founders. We profile a few in the book. One who went from the very glamorous position as a basketball player, playing for the Milwaukee Bucks to the very unglamorous position running Wendy's franchises, but made hundreds of millions of dollars as a very successful, Wendy's franchiser, Junior Bridgeman, from Chicago.

00:27:21 Andrew Keen: So you're dodging the question a little bit. I mean, is— you can always find black, brown entrepreneurs, successes, failures, but are we seeing a concentration, a narrowing, a broadening of all this?

00:27:37 Eric Zwick: So it's definitely the case that the class of star entrepreneurs, the success of these everywhere millionaires are not, like, a perfectly representative population from the US population. So they're more likely, as I said, to be sort of white men older on the older side. We, you know, try and tell a lot of stories of folks that aren't— don't look like that because there are a lot of those in the data as well. But, I think the fact that we don't have equal, you know, representation or equal sort of outcomes there is a question we wanna inquire. Is that about policy? Is that about, you know, what opportunities are available to a certain category of people versus others? I don't know if we have the answers to those in the book, but a few of the things that do seem to be quite important for building successful entrepreneurs is having exposure to a successful business owner early on in your career, whether it's working sort of in a small business where you kind of learn what it's like to run one, or whether it's having somebody in the family or in your local network. And you might imagine if we're starting from a position where certain groups have more of those role models or people to work for than others that, you know, that people might get more exposure if they're coming from those groups themselves. And so that could, you know, propagate inequality and who becomes a successful entrepreneur and suggest maybe there's opportunities for us to have more successful entrepreneurs from some of these lower represented groups. But, I don't know what the policy solution is just yet.

00:29:11 Andrew Keen: Well, that's the perennial. It's always been the problem with American capitalism. How much time did you spend with your everywhere millionaires? How do they explain their own success? Luck, hard work, religion? What was their— are there generalizations one can make, Eric, about how they perceive their own wealth and success?

00:29:38 Eric Zwick: Yes, Andrew. That's a great question that sort of links— I think, you know, the challenge with telling stories and having cases, right, is, like, these are outliers in different respects, and how do you get to something that you think is representative, generalizable, and useful going forward? When we talk to probably fifty, seventy five different of everywhere millionaires, you know, where we did detailed interviews, and we profiled another several hundred in the process of putting together the book. And, of course, like, the data we're working with is, you know, tens of millions of, observations and, you know, several million of these people that were able to characterize aspects of their business even without identifying who they were. When we talk to them and they tell their stories, there's a lot of ordeal in the early stages. So there's a lot of, you know, I didn't know what I was doing. I was just, like, you know, sleeping on the work table in the back of the business. I wasn't sure it was gonna work for many years. So there's a relentlessness to the pursuit of the business early on that, seems to be a unifying theme across them that's quite notable. I think more so than, like, raw intellect or IQ or, you know, test scores like we see in the data as a kind of weak predictor of being a star founder, which is quite interesting. But that grind seems to show up over and over again. Many of them do credit luck. They also credit kind of macro trends, so sort of picking up on a consumer trend early on, that was sort of a tailwind that allowed them to grow. Cases like Larry Miller's, like an auto dealer. There's also, you know, opportunities to kind of grow horizontally as, you know, deregulation allows businesses to be— some of these businesses to consolidate, sell across state lines, and so on. So those are some of the macro forces that people will credit even if, you know, they will sort of first talk about how hard they worked. They will talk about luck as well.

00:31:50 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I'm not gonna make any jokes about Larry Miller growing horizontally. Certainly could if he wants to be a professional basketball player. Is there regret as well? I mean, people always ask the question, about happiness and wealth. Many books have been written about that. Did you find that these people are happier, more pleased with their lives and perhaps with themselves, or maybe the element of regret of working too hard and not seeing their kids grow up, of having their first or second marriages undermined by their work habits. Are there generalizations, Eric, you can make from the conversations and the examples you have in this book?

00:32:30 Eric Zwick: I think, you know, this class of people tends to be pretty obsessed with the businesses while they're building them and really enjoy that. So they kind of just like doing it every day and maybe at the expense of not just hobbies, but the expense of spending time with their family. So there were certainly cases that we encountered where, the family life was not happy. And so this is definitely not a guarantee to happiness. I think it's also a bit of an explanation for why there aren't more people doing some of these unglamorous businesses, is that, you know, you have to kind of enjoy doing it every day or many days, in order to keep with it for so long. And so I think I wouldn't necessarily say, well, the American dream is alive, and so these this is the path to the ultimate happiness. This is the path to income, wealth, and that kind of prosperity. And those things are correlated with happiness, but there's no guarantee there.

00:33:32 Andrew Keen: As I said earlier, you went to Harvard. You teach at Chicago. Your co-author, Owen Zidar, went to Berkeley, now teaches at Princeton. So you cover that elite gamut. Most of the characters in your book perhaps are not from that class. And you note in the book that entrepreneurship or the kind of entrepreneurship that creates everywhere millionaires, creates more wealth than salaried individuals, maybe many of the people who graduate from Harvard and Berkeley and Princeton. Does that explain some of the cultural contradictions in America today, especially around politics?

00:34:15 Eric Zwick: I think there's a disconnect, especially in sort of the stories that we see in mainstream media on both sides of the political spectrum, which are so coastally-oriented. I mean, the media is sort of hollowed out in a lot of ways in the rest of the country, so you don't really see the lifestyles, or these characters, and they're not seeking the attention that, you know, Musk or Bezos is seeking necessarily by buying media companies. And so I think, yeah, we don't have a picture of them nearly the same way that we have of the tech billionaires or the public company CEOs. The Wendy's franchise owner that has 15 franchises, you know, they're, like, coaching Little League soccer, hanging out in the same bars and restaurants that a lot of Americans are in. You might not even know.

00:35:09 Andrew Keen: Right. They're all in, Walker County, Alabama.

00:35:12 Eric Zwick: For example. I mean, the whole map lights up there, so that's sort of like—

00:35:16 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And it's a remarkable map for people who are just listening to this. It's a map of the US. Millionaires are everywhere, and they literally are. When you see the normal wealth distribution, it's all on the coast in San Francisco and New York and LA, and this one is really distributed well.

00:35:33 Eric Zwick: Yeah. I mean, I think it's a— it's an a testament to how many different niches there are in the economy sort of. You know, like, think about all the parts in the supply chain going into a big name.

00:35:44 Andrew Keen: Yeah. All the fast food and the dentist networks and all the rest of it. I mean, Eric, there is a— the zeitgeist guys these days is of misery. Everyone seems to be miserable. Everyone is fearing the end of the world, and one way or the other, AI or inequality or global warming. From the research and thinking about this book, The Everywhere Millionaire, it suggests that we probably shouldn't be quite as miserable. Is that fair? I mean, even if you don't accept that this is perfectly good news, it's reasonably good news, isn't it, for America in the twenty twenties?

00:36:23 Eric Zwick: We talked to somebody who suggested that this was a rare time in history where you can be provocative by also being optimistic. And it's not to say that we're not trying to be, you know, unrealistic. We're not— certainly not saying this is the best of all possible worlds. There are a lot of problems that need solving. But if we're over-indexed on the problems, then we could, you know, diagnose why we're over-indexed on them. But, you know, our media landscape is not designed to take a representative slice of American society and describe it. It's designed to nurture engagement and entertain, and that's not necessarily gonna give the picture of the American economy the paths to prosperity that are available that sort of a random slice might give you. So I think that's a pretty important way to diagnose it. That's why we're sort of saying, look. You have to really look around in a way outside of the normal channels that you use to look at the world around you, and, you might see it quite differently, than how you're accustomed to.

00:37:23 Andrew Keen: Eric, the current American president whose name everybody knows is promising all Americans $5,000 if they return Republicans to both houses. How does he fit into this argument? So many people use him as Exhibit A in whatever argument they have, particularly arguments critical of America. He's not an everywhere millionaire, is he? Or is he? And in his own bizarre way, is he actually not quite as untypical as some people think?

00:38:01 Eric Zwick: I don't think his path is typical in a few ways. I think his path to wealth is primarily through media and then more recently through, you know, using the advantage of his political power to further enrich himself, which has been well documented. I think beyond that, he was also born, you know, not just in the top 1%, with the top 0.1% family, because of how successful his own father was as a developer. So when we look at the typical everywhere millionaire in our data, they don't come from the top 1% because there are 99 times as many people outside of that group. So I think we are over-indexed on him, I mean, because it's so visible, and very important for what's going on today in society, but we could probably remind ourselves the power even in this, you know, democracy is also quite a bit more distributed. There's a lot of power reserved to Congress. Congress has a House of Representatives. There's never a millionaire in every congressional district. They don't necessarily agree with the president even if they're in the party. Policy looks a little bit more like what they have in mind than what the president has in mind. And then a lot of power is reserved to the states, within the states to the counties and cities. And there, I mean, I feel like this person has very little power to influence public policy or to influence everyday lives of people. And I think you can see the influence of the everywhere millionaire is much more, sharply come in into view when you look at how local policy is made.

00:39:38 Andrew Keen: Eric, a few weeks ago, we had the— one of the editors at Reason magazine, the libertarian establishment, Stephanie Slade. We called the show the trickle-down morality of a free market girl. She's rather, I think, nostalgic for Reagan's libertarianism. I'm sure she's a big fan of the Tax Reform Act of 1986. Also very critical of the Republican Party's shift towards statism. In terms of your conversations with the everywhere millionaire, I'm guessing that maybe the majority were Republicans or certainly to the right, of the Democrats. Did you find, maybe the majority of them were traditional libertarians who wanted the state to mostly just keep out of economic affairs?

00:40:38 Eric Zwick: So there's some really interesting, data on these private business owners that comes from, surveying the political views of everybody who received Paycheck Protection Program loans because there you have, like, almost all of the small businesses in the country. That data suggests that this group is more likely to be Republican than the general population and also that within those preferences, they do focus on things like regulation and taxes. For sure, thinking about things that affect their bottom lines because that's what they're more focused on. They're not so obsessed with social issues, I think, as kind of the Twitter feed might suggest the American public is. At the same time, I think we're, you know, quite surprised to learn how many Democrats there are coming from this class of everywhere millionaires. And, you know, seeing a ton of these types of representatives in Congress and at the state and local level, I think it's actually more enlightening about why certain policies persist, why certain policies are kept off the table even when the Democrats are in power. And so I think, like, it's more surprising how the power of this class cuts across the traditional partisan line, even if it does skew a bit more Republican overall.

00:41:54 Andrew Keen: Last week, we had Adam Jentleson on the show, very influential democratic organizer. He used to be chief of staff, Fetterman, not a very popular senator these days. He has a vision of big-tent Democrats. He wants to see Democrats build lasting power in a book, just out called Supermajority. What are the lessons then for centrist Democrats from your book? How are they gonna win the everywhere millionaires? As you suggested, maybe the majority have a traditional Republican sympathy, although some of them might be slightly ambivalent about the current state of the Republican Party. How can the Dems win this class who are, as you know, the wealthiest and in their own way, certainly in economic, if not cultural terms, the most wealthy— the wealthiest class in the United States? If the Democrats are to win back power, both in the White House and in Congress, how can they win these people? How can they get their money and their support?

00:43:01 Eric Zwick: So I think it is an important lesson that— you know, I've seen a lot of people kind of in comments on some of these articles that you're talking about in the media on our book. Like, even from more, you know, liberal positions or places talk about how, you know, they're aspiring to a more prosperous life for themselves or their children. And starting a business or, you know, run it— buying and growing a business into something very successful is an important path for upward mobility. And I think that is a path to a happy life that people on in the center really want for their families, and they want that more so than they care about some of the social issues that really get way, way, way more attention. I— Then we shouldn't forget about that, and we shouldn't just, like, knee-jerk vilify the people who build these successful businesses. At the same time, there's a lot of concern about affordability these days. And if we just— if Democrats just fixate on, like, the Fortune 50 companies or something, they're gonna be missing the mark in terms of ways to actually improve affordability in a lot of markets where we've seen these everywhere millionaires restrict entry, raise prices, and, capture some rents for themselves. And so I think, like, you know, the Democrats need to pay attention to the problems as they are and not how they're showing up in the Twitter feed.

00:44:27 Andrew Keen: But in Madisonian terms, do does your everywhere millionaire class, do they behave as a kind of informal faction? Do they tend to— I think pressure? Do they lobby governments and lobby the government, invest in lobbying groups to pursue their own interests as any social class does or at least as Madison imagined them to do?

00:44:52 Eric Zwick: Yes. I mean, they have as we were saying, there's, you know, there are many everywhere millionaires in each congressional district because of this geographic dispersion, which means that they're not running for office themselves. Many of them are on both— in both parties, they are, you know, very likely to be supporting folks that are running for office. And so when policies are on the table that target them, whether it's tax policy or regulatory policy, they have a lot more influence over that policy being written, and that's not just something that we see Republican policymakers sort of performing that way. And so I think it's important for us to recognize the influence of this class on policy, especially when it doesn't benefit the massive voters.

00:45:43 Andrew Keen: Finally, Eric, the glass is clearly half full when it comes to this. I mean, as you know, lots of ways that one can interpret this book, which is why it's getting such great reviews, embraced both on the left and the right by the New Yorker and Wall Street Journal. It's hard to find books which are embraced by both sides. How for you can we make the glass more than half full? What are the ways forward? The American dream still exists, maybe not quite as resilient as it once was, or we'd like to have it. But what would you like to see to make the everywhere millionaire class more accessible to ordinary Americans?

00:46:29 Eric Zwick: So I'd encourage people to just look around wherever they are, whether it's, like, on their way to work, going down Main Street or Metro Parkway and thinking about who owns those businesses that are that I'm passing by. What's the story behind where that came from? Or if they go next time they go to, you know, a fast-casual restaurant, go in the drive-through, think about, well, who owns this franchise? How many franchises do they own? And then go in and they eat and they look around. Well, who made the buns? Who made the cheese? Like, start to think about where all the stuff around them comes from, and then use that to sort of get a better picture of the economy around them and the different opportunities that are available. A way that, you know, we're not used to looking because we're thinking, oh, you have to start an app or be an influencer, or you have to be born rich in order to get rich. You know, I think that recognition then sort of leads people who want to go there to have a little bit more of a blueprint how to get there. It leads people who are concerned about the inequality and the affordability problems that creates to think maybe more constructively about solving it. Is a tax on 50 billionaires gonna move the needle at all? Not really. You know, we need to think about a much broader tax reform if we want to address after-tax inequality. So I think, you know, those are some examples of how people taking the message of the book, which isn't really a policy advocacy exercise at all.

00:47:56 Andrew Keen: It's— But everyone's gonna take from it because of the nature that— because it's such a— it's the third rail in American politics. It's unavoidable and inevitable, Aaron [as spoken: Eric].

00:48:05 Eric Zwick: Oh, I agree. No. I mean, look. Like I said, we're showing you the world as it is, and then you can take it. Some people are gonna take it to learn about the world, and that's great. Some people who have policies they want to achieve regardless of what data we show them are going to pursue those regardless. Can't really control them. But we can just sort of say, here's what you should be looking at if you wanna understand the world as it is and leave it at that.

00:48:29 Andrew Keen: If you wanna understand America, then think about the everywhere millionaire when you go to the dentist or the doctor or you buy or sell a house or you go and eat at your local fast food restaurant. Or maybe, Eric, the ultimate advice from this book is when you leave graduate school, you go to the US Treasury Office of Tax Analysis to do some unpaid work because that will make you ultimately very rich. Is that fair?

00:48:56 Eric Zwick: Being a writer is definitely not a path to prosperity we describe in the book because I'm not super optimistic about that. This is more about having some fun and learning some stuff about the world. But, but, but that's a little less—

00:49:10 Andrew Keen: If you wanna make Eric Zwick and his co-author, Owen Zidar, everywhere millionaires, you need to go out and buy this new book. The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There. It's out today, and I think it's gonna be one of the most influential books on economics and American wealth this year. Thank you so much, Eric.

00:49:29 Eric Zwick: Thank you, Andrew. It was really a pleasure.