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

Andrew Keen (0:00)

Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.

Hello, everybody. It's Tuesday, September the 15th, 2026 Yesterday, we did a show with our 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 well?

Eric Zwick (2:19)

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.

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? 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 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 what we consume. And so maybe we're led to believe that all of morality is sort of 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 the problems they've identified they're trying to solve. But I don't really think of them on moral crusades one way or the other.

Andrew Keen (3:51)

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. 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? 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 want to be millionaires? Do they want to get rich, do you think?

Eric Zwick (4:52)

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 50 years ago with like 1,100 bucks and he was a kid of immigrants, grew up in a housing project.

Andrew Keen (5:13)

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.

Eric Zwick (5:22)

He has many housing projects now and some yachting projects. Yeah, so we found him in yacht registration data because he has a super yacht called Top Dog. He sold that business 50 years later. We chronicled his story.

Andrew Keen (5:37)

Top Dog, so he's got a good imagination and sense of humor, this Portillo character.