September 14, 2026 - Trump Downplays Calls for AI Slowdown

Eric Zwick joins me on the radio Monday. He and Owen Zidar have written a book called "The Everywhere Millionaire," and it upends the picture most of us carry of the American rich. When we think of wealth, we think of Silicon Valley, Wall Street and the Forbes 400. Zidar and Zwick say look closer to home. The real money is in the beer distributorship, the chain of dental practices, the HVAC contractor, the family that owns the car dealerships out on the highway. They call them Main Street millionaires. Their average wealth is around $25 million, and taken together they hold roughly 13 times the wealth of the Forbes 400. They are not on the coasts. They don't get much attention. But they are all around us.

When I first saw the book I assumed it was an update of the 1990s bestseller "The Millionaire Next Door." Similar idea, but the insight here is on a different level, because of what the authors were allowed to see. The project began when the Treasury Department asked two economists a basic question: how much are business owners actually paying in taxes? Nobody knew. Answering it required unprecedented access to tax records, some of them in formats that hadn't been touched in years, and Zidar and Zwick figured out how to make the data talk.

What the data says is that our fixation on Big Banks, Big Oil and Big Tech serves a purpose - for them. The louder the argument about Jeff Bezos, the less anyone notices the local operator who dominates a regional market, shows up at the zoning board, writes the checks in a state senate race and bends policy to protect what he's built. That is market power too. It just doesn't make cable news.

There's a Scottish proverb in the book I can't shake: "The father buys, the son builds, the grandchild sells, and his son begs." Main Street fortunes have historically dissolved within four generations. Whether that still holds is one of the things I want to ask Zwick.

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