>> publishing executive steve forbes discussed the economy, health care, trade, and taxes in light of the trump presidency and the 2020 election at the detroit economic club. [applause] steve: i have been asked today to make some observations about the economy and the elections. that is one reason why we did the documentary a little over a year ago. there is a feeling of the country even though we are doing well economically, things are still not quite right, and people cannot quite put their finger on it, but this year in the election, we will have one of those unusual elections in the united states, even though the campaign started in a rather uninspiring manner. no one would confuse it with greek philosophers debating life or the lincoln-douglas debates or anything like that, but there are going to be very basic questions. the most basic one of all is, what kind of country do we want for the future? we have had these debates before. we had them in the 1850's before the civil war. we had them in the 1890's, which people do not recall today, but in the early 1890's, people were in turmoil. there was great concern. we had immigration, the rise of big cities with corruption, seemingly unstoppable corruption, a stagnant agricultural sector, and also a feeling of what this country was going to be. inre was an historian wisconsin by the name of frederick jackson turner who wrote the paper in the early 1890's about a circular that came out from the census bureau based on the 1890 census, and what the bureau said was the american frontier is closed, that the era of free land is at an end, and this is what turner called "the frontier thesis" and thesis" as a gained circulation in the country. it really set off an intense anxiety debate. with the closing of the frontier, would we just evolve to be a country like everyone else? the feeling was everyone came here and moved west. you could always go west and start over. it led to more and more democracy. take wyoming, which had women voting before the constitution having it nationwide, people learning to be self-sufficient, and all of this was going to come to a close now that the frontier was officially over. the upshot of it was, yes, we did have some changes. the rise of big corporations, "trusts," they were called at the time, leading to the antitrust movement with teddy roosevelt, but it turns out the pioneering spirit was not dependent on land or moving west. it is what we now call "entrepreneurship," "pioneering of the mind," "creation." what we are having one of these debates today, and we will be seeing it. what kind of health care system do we want? what kind of education system do we want? what is america's place in the world? and let's start with the economy. as i mentioned, overall, the economy is doing well. unemployment is at the lowest in half a century, among minorities, record lows. we have more job openings than people who are unemployed. wages are going up, especially for low-income workers. new business formations have recovered after the disaster of 2008. the recovery in new business formations was very, very slow, years, it past few has picked up very remarkably. what a lot of people do not know is that the group in this country that is creating more new businesses than any other group by far is the latino community, but nobody covers it. what has also happened in the last few years is the rise of african-american businesses being created, independent businesses being created, so the creativity in this country is there, and the poverty level, the lowest in 17 years, fewer people on food stamps. the stock market, we all know how well that has done. the big overhang though has been trade, and i will make it clear since i am not running for anything. i am no fan of tariffs. "tariff" is another word for "sales tax." it is a sales tax on american consumers and american businesses. i believe in terms of dealing with the trade abuses from china and some others, there are other laserlike approaches you can take, going after specific individuals and countries who violate things. we have never consistently enforced our trade rules in the past. we can do so now. the great arbiter of trade disputes is the wto. we win 85% of the cases we bring there. it needs to be modernized, as it needs in the digital age. the last was done in the 1990's. it could use one now. there are loopholes in the system. that is what we should be focusing on. i think if you do that, you will get as much result in dealing with those abuses as putting taxes on each other. now, china is more hurt by tariffs than we are thanks to deregulation and the tax cut of 2017. the tariff wars have not been too harmful to the economy, but they have taken a toll. instead of growing at 3%, we are growing above 2%. why is that? investment. if you do not know what the rules of the road are, you're less likely to make investment. you have to know what the rules of the road are. thankfully, the tax cut of 2017 has helped ameliorate the uncertainty, but it has certainly taken a toll. it looks like capex, capital expenditures, is now beginning to rise again. hopefully, that will take place. in a couple of days, we will get phase one formal signing of a trade deal with china. the usmca, the u.s.-mexico-canada agreement, hopefully will pass the senate after this impeachment trial. i was hoping they could get it done before the impeachment trial. in a few weeks, that will finally get it passed. hopefully, we will avoid a trade war with europe. there is already talk about putting 25% tariffs on auto parts and auto imports. the industry is against that. people do not realize how integrated the supply systems are in manufacturing today, and the abuses, as i say, we can take care of by taking a laserlike approach with the actual abusers, and in terms of china, in terms of their misbehavior, you go after those who do wrong, and you will get a response, whether it is sanctions, you take a bank that is behaving in a wrong way, and you take them and kick them out of what is called the "swift system," where they cannot do international payments anymore. that is the deathknell. so there are tools in our kit to deal with specific abuses. hopefully, as these trade wars subside, we will get a pickup in investment in the second half, but another overhang, of course, is the election itself. what kind of country will we be? which direction will we go after these elections? and the debate, as i mentioned, a rather uninspiring start. i do think, though, it is going to lead to some fundamental debates. let's start with health care. what kind of health-care system do we want? should it be imitative of what they have in europe or the rest of the world? the administration has some initiatives in terms of pricing transparency and the like, but this then though gets to a very basic question. why do we have a health-care crisis? the short answer is people are getting older. we want more services. therefore, prices go up. we have an inaffordability/affordability problem, but then, step back and ask yourself a question. why is it demand for health care is considered a crisis whereas demand for anything else in this economy is considered a great opportunity? people want more cars and trucks. people in this town and elsewhere would be glad to help you out. got to pander. [laughter] i know where my free lunch came from. why is it in every other part of the economy considered a great opportunity, but in health care, oh, my god, what a disaster we have. the system does not have real free markets. it is basically all still third-party. it is not patient-doctor. it is third party, whether it is insurance companies, where most people get their coverage, medicare and medicaid on the government side, some large employers, but it is all third party. the hospital knows that its revenues depend on how well it negotiates with insurance companies for reimbursements or how they deal with medicare, medicaid, not on how they satisfy the patient. again, trying to scapegoat this or that is not going to work. we should realize with the problem is and then try to correct it, which is already starting to begin to happen, but to see where the patient lies in that foodchain right now, all you have to do is realize this. the lousiest motel in america would not dare put you in a room with another guest, a sick guest, with a curtain in between. [laughter] steve: think of it. just wouldn't do it. or those robes they sometimes give you? they look like they have been washed by the salvation army 10,000 times. you need an instruction manual, put it backwards, forwards, too big, too small. no spa would give you those things. and in terms of pricing, because it is third-party, you do not have a real market. telling the kids, a friend of mine in new hampshire several years ago had a heart condition, so went to the cardiologist, and among some of the things the cardiologist says is you should have a nuclear stress test, and i tell the kids how they come up with the names for these things. i don't know. but what they do is they put a little radiation in a liquid and put it -- i don't know, but anyway, it was one of the tests. so the guy asks the doctor, "so how much does this cost?" and the doctor says, "no idea. insurance will cover it. maybe. but do not worry about it." but this guy, being an entrepreneur, not taking things as they were, went out, and he goes to 25 different clinics and hospitals and pries out the price. it is done everywhere. the prices ranged from $1450 to $7300, same test. now, if you had a normal free-market, that would not happen, especially in the age we have now with instant communication. so, the end of the story, the guy goes back to the doc, and the doc says, "i had no idea it costs that much," and he does a few calculation and says, "with your situation, it is less then 2% chance we would get any useful information, so let's just drop it." that is what happens. and part of the problem, too, when you have third party, you try to do everything top-down instead of organically coming from people's needs and wants in the marketplace. take electronic records. 25 years ago, every gas station in the country had electronic records. every retailer had electronic records. you had to do it, or you wouldn't survive. it did not happen in health care. why? because there is no competitive advantage to do it. somebody said, "let's have electronic records. i would never have to read doctors' handwriting again, so yay." this is why cms, the centers for medicaid services, has to have regulations each year to try to cover things that would be done in the course of people interacting with supplier and consumer. so in terms of health care, there may be some very good ideas, but -- warranties, for example, guaranteeing that a certain procedure that does not work, you do not pay for it. like if you buy a lemon, you're covered by a warranty. why didn't you get warranty? one in pennsylvania did, but they were an outlier. and then people say, "let's have government control everything." the problem with that, as the europeans found out, it hurts innovation. europe was once a great font of new devices and went to a one-payer system. it went to -- and went to a one-payer system. it crushed innovation. that is why most innovation comes from the united states now instead of being more spread around the world. however, big changes are coming, and if we do not muck up the environment, what is going to happen is we're going to see an uber-lyft type disruption, or like the disruption of my industry with the invention of the internet, but you will see huge changes coming because of something that's happened, and it's already bringing up repercussions. most employers now for insurance provide insurance that have high deductibles. many of them help you cover it with health savings accounts, which are becoming more and more popular, giving you more and more control of resources, but what has happened is people are paying more now out-of-pocket even though official medical inflation is not very high. people are paying more than they ever did before, or at least getting charged with it hoping they have something in their hsa to cover it. this leads to knowing more about costs, and that is affecting the market. you already see the rise of services, sort of medical priceline and expedia. what do something cost, like the nuclear stress test? why does an mri cost 10 times as much at one institution versus 1/10 of what it does at another hospital? these things are beginning to happen. what that means is you get that kind of consumerism, you're going to get automatically both productivity gains, because suddenly there will be an advantage to doing it, and you will get more innovation. there is a lot of innovation in health care, but we are going to get a lot, lot more. the trump administration is pushing the posting of prices by insurers and by hospitals. that is very good, but it is going to be the pressures of the marketplace that do it more than decrees by the federal government, and so, if you want to look at the future, look at the surgery center of oklahoma. that institution in oklahoma was started by a couple of anesthesiologists a couple of years ago, and their big thing is they do not take insurance. no medicaid, no medicare. right, insurance, by law, they have to take it if you insist, but they urge you not to. they posted all of their prices online. if you want surgery, you can know. that way, you do not get a bill years later. they have a fixed price, and if it goes above the price, they eat the cost, so they are a very lean organization. they are board-certified surgeons, so it is not equality issue. the state of oklahoma even sends their employees there, because they end up saving money because it costs so much less. take, for example, a sophisticated kind of sinus operation. they do it at the surgery center, and a normal hospital in the region, costing about $17,000. there it is about $5,000, same result. so that is the kind of thing you will see in the future. more and more consumerism, but also what we get when we have real, free markets, productivity, innovation, and also it would lead to more effective safety nets. food, for example, which is more basic than health care -- you do not have food, you do not have anything -- government is still very much involved in agriculture, but government does not run agriculture. if it did, we would not have obesity, because we would be starving. they tried in the old soviet union and in china in the 1950's with disastrous results, so in agriculture, the farmers process the food. people process and sell the food, and if people have problems getting it, we have everything from food banks to food stamps to help. the safety nets, but also, more for less. now, we get very spoiled from that very quickly. take, for example, phone handhelds, which are amazing. the whole world is at your fingertips. if you tried to describe a handheld 25 years ago, people would say, "oh, no, it will not happen." and now if you place a call to outer mongolia, it takes six seconds, "what a piece of crap this is. it is taking so long." [laughter] you're going to see debate and what kind of system we have, but what is going to emerge if we allow it is a totally different system, neither what we had before or what you find overseas. for example, one of the things that is going to happen is in terms of drug pricing. why do the prices keep going up? you have that high-deductible plan, so you are feeling that more, but with the system we have today, it costs about $2.6 billion to bring a drug successfully to market. you have to cover all of the failures you had beforehand. this should be a trade issue. right now, the reason canada and others can sell the drugs so cheaply is they do not pay for the development costs, and like with tony soprano, they say to pair if a you do not price we will steal the patents , from you." we should not eat that $2.6 billion by ourselves. around the world should have a share in that. pharmaceutical benefit managers, middle person, where 40% to 50% of the price is. let's have some transparency there. drug manufacturing, it's amazing. how we manufacture drugs today is still in the dark ages. when you think of pharma, very cutting age and new stuff, but the way they manufacture their pills and medicines, it is way, way, way, way antiquated. that is beginning to change. some entrepreneurs are going to be changing that in the next few years. right now, because of the ancient way we do things, there are 121 critical drugs that are in short supply. some are facing real critical shortages in some of the medicines they prescribe for their patients, so these things are going to change. another thing you're going to see is the attack on c.o.n.'s, certificates of need. if you want to start a facility, expand a facility, start a new service, in 35 states and d.c. you have to get permission from , the government. now, does starbucks need permission to open a shop next to dunkin' donuts? no, you just do it and see which one wins. got to get more flexibility in the free market there. so in terms of health care, there will be a debate, but what is going to be creeping up is not saying with some reforms or europe with maybe some tweaks. it is going to be something emerging totally new, which is the virtue of free markets. frederick jackson was worried about it back in the 1890's. that kind of pioneering entrepreneurship is going to do something that is going to be very exciting. this, of course, leads to taxes. amazingly, on the democratic side, they are all prescribing taxes, even a moderate like joe biden. he's got tax proposals that increase taxes $3 trillion over the next 10 years, more than twice what hillary clinton did in 2016. that now counts as moderate. you look at warren and sanders and all of their tax proposals, what they do not understand in terms of things like a wealth tax, it seems these people have a cartoon caricature. some of you may be old enough to remember scrooge mcduck, a comic character from disney. he would sit in his money bin with all of his cash and jewelry and gold bars and that kind of thing, and it is like the cash. you just go in and help yourself to the cash. most wealth is not cash. most wealth is assets like a factory or a patent or a way of doing things, and if you have an environment which is antithetical, which is hostile to that kind of environment, those asset values goes down, so you take jeff bezos, postdivorce still worth $120 billion. i like it how some say she could have gotten more. youvorce lawyer who can get $120 billion in a settlement is a pretty good one. [laughter] well, not bad for a few week's work. another subject, another time, but $120 billion that you have out there. if suddenly he cannot operate his business the way he has, you could see the stock fall in half. that $60 billion goes in poof. that is not cash like scrooge mcduck. those are asset values. corporation -- with the hostile creation of asset values, that stuff disappears very quickly. so i hope that they learned that in terms of taxation, more is less. when you have a lighter regime, and history shows this -- there is a book out called "the magic formula," and you can find it online, written by nathan lewis, and it shows states that have stable money and low taxes always do better than those that do not, even if you look at sweden and denmark held up as an example of what some think we should be. they created that initial wealth by having that benign environment, and then, when they went in the opposite direction, sweden has retreated from a lot of the things that the democrats want to do here, including death taxes. sweden does not have an inheritance tax. so you have got to examine these things. anyway, what this gets to is my favorite hobby horse, which is the flat tax. sadly, the republicans are not going for this time, but the tax code, as you know, is a horror. if you add up the tax code, not just the code itself but all of the rules and regulations, if is 10 million words and rising. -- and regulations, if you add it up, it is 10 million words and rising. the bible is only 73,000 words, so no one knows what is in it. the irs does not know what is in it. you call their hotline. if they answer it, one third of the time, they give you the wrong answer and hold you responsible for it. a survey was done, taking a hypothetical family, giving the numbers to 46 experts in the field, and you know what they got back? 46 different returns, 46 different estimates of what the family owed, in some cases thousands of dollars different. this code brings out the worst in us. it is corrupt, complex. i think we should do what 30 other countries have done. just get rid of it and start all over. [applause] steve: i would put in a simple flat tax. you would have exemptions for adults and children, and that is it. a family of four, their first $52,800 of salary free. only $0.17 per dollar above that. no tax on savings or death taxes. you should be able to leave the world unmolested by the irs, and we would have a more vibrant economy, and it is a moral issue. you go back 20 years. the irs estimates we spent 6 billion hours a year filling out tax years. experts say we spent over 200 billion hours complying with this monstrosity. just go back years. tens of billions of hours, over 100 billions of hours, and those resources, if they had instead gone to create new products, new services, new medical devices, new drugs, how much better off we would all be today? you end up raising more revenue, so what is not to like? the republicans are talking about tax cut 2.0. tax cut 1.0, despite making hopelessly complicated pass-through divisions, but it was pretty good, a tax then coming out of washington, talking about a 2.0, reducing the tax rate for middle income earners from 22% to 15%. i hope they go much further than that. i hope they go much further than -- i hope they go much further than that. if you look at europe, the taxes in europe, how does europe pay for its free stuff? bernie sanders is honest. he says he is going to hit the middle class with more taxes. he is honest about it. in europe, they help pay for it with the vat, a super sales tax. in europe, the typical vat is 20%, 25%. if you buy something for $100, you end up paying $125, and what they did with the vat is it is hidden in the cost, so you do not see the breakout. the payroll tax in this country, the call it fica, the tax you pay in your paycheck for things like medicare and for social security. in this country, the total rate, employer and employee, 15.3%. typically in europe, it is about 35% to 50% off the top. their income taxes are higher. where they do better is corporate taxes. but you can see, nothing is free. they pay for it one way or the other, and so let me just close on another big issue, which is education. we have a scandal there, $1.6 trillion of student debt, and college was once seen as a propellant for upward mobility. you get that degree, by golly, you have got a better life in front of you. now, you end up graduating, if you graduate -- many students do not graduate even after six years -- they end up with resembling a mortgage, and they wonder where they will go from here. it reduces their flexibility. i told the kids earlier, a graduate student asking what we should do after college, don't take that highest paying job. you are young. do something different. go to china and teach english for two years. they are always looking for english teachers. you will learn a lot about the culture, about the world, about doing things on your own. it would be a great thing. you're young enough to do it. but if you're in debt, you cannot do those things, much less flexibility in discovering what you're good at and what your talents are. you only learn that from experience. so what about this debt? it came out of world war ii. one of the great things we did after world war ii was the g.i. bill of rights, which paid for college for millions of veterans. really one of those programs that worked. unfortunately, the way it has evolved, and no one designed it this way, it ended up the more aid that was put in, the higher the cost went, so i think that is what you're going to see the future, a whole new, different way of education. it will not be everyone doing the four years or six years or whatever. you will have more doing it in three years and more and more institutions try to adapt what perdue is doing. they have a new president. mitch daniels seven years ago. he has frozen tuition for seven straight years. he made a deal with amazon for getting cheaper textbooks. today, it costs a student entering perdue less than it did seven years ago even though he has hired more tenured professors, so it can be done. also, you will see more and more certificates of proficiency, so people are not going to do four years, because they can do it online. starbucks, for example, has a very innovative program with arizona state where baristas at night can get a college degree over a time and work during the day. you will see that more and more. finally, in this area, a real debate about what is education. part of it is proficiency but also the goodness of learning humanities. learning for the sake of learning, and so, you're going to have a combination. you're going to be practical, but also, there will be a new appreciation of developing that mind. as i told the students, in closing, i asked a question that so many others have asked like george gill and others. what is the difference between us today and people during the stone age? same planet, same resources, same appetite, same human body. the difference between us is we know more. we have more knowledge. so even if we have a disaster from a war or a disease, you can recover if knowledge is not destroyed, and you saw it after world war ii. devastation in western europe, japan. tens of millions of people killed. people thought it would be generations before it would get recovery. while, with the u.s. umbrella, they exceeded production because knowledge was not destroyed. you knew what to do, and you could rebuild. entrepreneurs in the marketplace or a laboratory or a scholarship or whatever the source. getting that new knowledge is how you move ahead, which is unpredictable. you cannot predict what you're going to fight or how things are going to turn out, but steve jobs made the point that these are not opposites. they are two sides of the same coin. you must do both. so i think you will see a new appreciation both for being more practical but also the virtue of learning and trying to make yourself that better person that the greeks talked about, so in conclusion, with this election, a lot rides on in terms of what kind of future, but even though it may look a little discouraging now, we have had these debates before. we will probably have another one in 40 or 50 years. what is amazing about this country is we always find a way to renew and move ahead. thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you, mr. forbes. we have a few questions. we have close to 10 minutes to go through some of these questions. let's start with a student question first. are you ready? what will be the short-term and long-term impacts of autonomous vehicles on our economy? steve: first of all, despite all of the publicity, we are still a long way from reliable autonomous vehicles. it turns out it is a very complicated thing. you go back to the end of the auto age. all you do is put a vehicle on a truck, on a bed, and voila. a wagon, you have an automobile? no, very complicated, a very different thing, so i think when you're fine with autonomous vehicles more and more is you have to take from scratch and not start with what exists and hope it works with software. you will see some progress. but the reason it is going to take off, eventually, they will get it right. the reason it is going to be a boon is because people my age, one of the things you dread when you get older, will they take my license away? will i lose that mobility? now, with an autonomous vehicle, you can say i want to go here or worry about that license, so it'll be a great liberator to bring this technology along. old,et older -- not but older -- [laughter] >> one of our most popular questions, what do you think the republican party looks like five and 10 years from now? steve: if i knew what anything look like other than more wrinkles five or 10 years from now, i would be on the "forbes" 400 list. [laughter] steve: but i think what you will see, what happens, you will find a blend of what he has introduced, what the party has done in the past. i think, hopefully, it will be, and maybe this is me wishing, more appreciative of free trade, that is the ability to sell with each other and putting the emphasis on enforcing existing rules, so we do not have to avoid putting sales taxes on ourselves, but the other part in terms of opportunity, restoring patient control in health care and the like, having a tax code that allows us to focus our brainpower on more productive things, i hope that is still part and parcel, and also, like it or not, we have to be a part of the world, and that does not mean to make everything perfect in the world. we should have learned by now that does not work, but making sure the bad guys in the world do not feel like they have a free run. we are the only country that can lead those forces against the bad guys. the others just do not have the capacity to do it or the trust. even though everyone may hate the u.s., they say, but the bottom line is they want us there, especially if there is trouble on the horizon. whoever would have thought, who grew up in the 1960's and 1970's, the people who want us most in asia now vietnam. , they are right next to china. they have dealt with china for thousands of years. they know what their neighbor can do. they had a war 40 years ago, a brief one, so they want our presence there as a counter of china as it grows economically. of course, a dominant power there, but it is quite another having a dominant economic power then what they feel -- i am telling you what they tell me -- a bully. they do not want that. they want the trade, not the overriding politics. >> it looks like we have time for one more question. in your opinion, what three things made this country so great? steve: what made this country great? one is freedom. came from england, holland and then england. even when we were colonists, colonies of britain, we had a large amount of autonomy, and this ability to have self-governance was critical. it is one reason why we grew faster than the rest of the world in north america, going back to the 1750's. 1760's. before we had the revolutionary war. popularly, there was a great rivalry at the time between french north america and british north america, and after what we call the seven years war -- we call it the french and indian wars, 1750's, 1760's -- one reasons why the brits triumphed was the population of british north america, because britain had such a loose and haphazard colonial policy. they would sometimes be overbearing. other times, they would just ignore us. our population was over two million. french north america was 60,000 because of the rigid control from paris, but also key to that was the belief you could reinvent yourself. what frederick jackson turner talked about. the idea you could move, you could re-create yourself, start over. the past was not going to hold you back. the future was yours. it was in your hands. what we call the pioneer spirit, entrepreneurial spirit, you can do it, whatever name you want to put to it. that was critical. and the idea, too, which dovetails with the freedom is that ultimately, consent has to come from the governed. consent has to come from the governed, which is critical, because the rule of law, if you want to challenge the existing powers of structure, many societies, they will crush you. one quick example, china 500 years ago had shipbuilding capabilities every bit as good and some say better than europe, but the authorities there decided they did not like this exploration that some of these chinese sailors were starting to do. they broke the ships up even though they were very advanced and told the sailors, do not do that again and come home, because if you do, we will kill you. china cut itself off of the world. europe surged ahead, and we are living with the consequences of that today, so that ability for rule of law and freedom to challenge existing power structures, that is critical to moving ahead. otherwise, you stagnate. >> we like to say the last five -- we like to save the last five minutes of each lunch for a lightning round, a series of short answer questions. are you ready? steve: sure. >> here you go. something on your bucket list. steve: i am not sure the arthritis would allow it, throwing an opening pitch of a baseball game. i might have the catcher two feet away, but i still dream of it sometimes. >> a person other than a family member you would like to have lunch with. steve: right now, i would like to sit down with pope francis and have a discussion, a philosophical discussion, given his background on markets on how the economy should work. it would be a give and take. i would maybe learn from him. ab might learn from me. i would at least give him a free subscription to "forbes." [laughter] >> one of your favorite songs. steve: i guess one of them, nothing profound, "hey jude" by "heroes," david bowie, written after the fall of wall.rlin >> favorite team growing up. steve: favorite team growing up was the dodgers, and then they moved, and i became a yankees fan. i should not say that here, but i am all for the tigers unless they play the yankees. >> your best sport, baseball? steve: no, i love baseball, love following baseball, but i had a little bit of capacity at tennis. right now, it is bicycle riding. i enjoy that. it is easy, and hopefully no one is going to run me over, but i enjoy doing it. >> last book you read? steve: the last book i read was by a fellow by the name of richard snow, called "disney's land," and it just came out a few weeks ago. it is about how walt disney created disneyland, and we think of amusement parks now is no big deal, a lot of people have them, but the disney amusement parks but when disney considered it amusement parks were considered , garbage. before disney, they were dirty, bad food. they cheated on the games of chance they had that, and it was disreputable, and this is an amazing story of his concept of it, when he entered it, like a movie, all of the rides they invented. inventing a ride is hard enough. they invented every single one they did. it is america lake got done. nearly destroyed the company financially. he hocked his life insurance, borrowing from executives, but he bet everything on his vision and made it happen. quite a story. >> one of your favorite movies? steve: favorite movies. well, i always liked "braveheart." then there is a documentary that came out about a year ago by peter jackson. "the hobbit" and all that. it was a documentary called "they shall not grow old." it was an amazing feat. it was about the british army in world war i, and the colorization he was able to do, the recreation of the sounds and the equipment at the time, and an extraordinary technical achievement, stirring about this greatest man-made disaster in 1914, 1918, but a stirring documentary. if you can find it, i think, online -- youtube, so many things today -- and i should not mention it, but i will. where is the exit? i did enjoy "ford v. ferrari." [laughter] yes, and then, one that got no play at all, which i thought was very well done, was "richard jewell." very moving, very well done. >> favorite vacation spot. steve: detroit. no. [laughter] steve: but no favorite. i can go anywhere and enjoy something new. >> how about describing detroit in one word? steve: opportunity. it is here. [applause] >> fantastic. and one of our favorite questions, advice to your 25-year-old self? steve: just a reminder. you are 25. you are going to learn a lot. the only way to learn is by going out and trying, and sometimes you will look foolish, but if you do not try it, you're not going to learn, and every successful entrepreneur or leader has gone through periods where they have looked like idiots. things just did not work out. so be easy on yourself. explore, but don't think you will arrive in the world full-blown. your education when you get that degree is just beginning, just beginning. >> great advice, mr. forbes. thank you for joining us this afternoon. steve: thank you. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2020] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> at 10:00 a.m. eastern on c-span, a look at the skills and training needed to deploy 5g technology in the u.s. p.m., mike bloomberg speaks at the u.s. conference of mayors. the senate impeachment trial of president trump continues with opening arguments from house managers and the president's defense team. 3, a hearing on the economic development administration to create jobs and economic growth. that is at 10:00 a.m. eastern. >> this morning on "washington we arge"