Steve Forbes, chairman and editor-in-chief of Forbes Media, spoke Thursday (April 16) about the importance of a stable currency in encouraging economic growth, artificial intelligence (AI) and health care innovation, and the discovery of previously unrecognized opportunities.
Forbes was the keynote speaker at the 2026 Bacon + Eggonomics breakfast fundraiser at Heartland Whole Health Institute in Bentonville. More than 300 people attended the event, hosted by educational organization Economics Arkansas.
Ross DeVol, chairman emeritus and distinguished fellow at Heartland Forward, moderated a question-and-answer session with Forbes after he spoke. The event also included a presentation by Lisa Taylor, master economics teacher at Willis D. Shaw Elementary in Springdale, and her students who discussed their experiences as young entrepreneurs.
Forbes, who previously spoke at a similar breakfast event in central Arkansas in 2024, said the success of Northwest Arkansas companies, including J.B. Hunt Transport Services, Tyson Foods and Walmart, “shows that we have an environment of freedom where people are free to do big things. It doesn’t matter where you are in the world; you can make wealth happen. You can make prosperity happen.”
He said Walmart founder Sam Walton learned about retail from his experience with retailer Ben Franklin and expanded upon it.
“He (Walton) learned what other people thought they knew, and then saw opportunities that others didn’t,” Forbes said. “And that gets to the essence of what a free enterprise or entrepreneurship is about is discovering previously unrecognized opportunities.”
Steve Forbes, right, speaks Thursday (April 16) in Bentonville during a question-and-answer session moderated by Ross DeVol, chairman emeritus and distinguished fellow at Heartland Forward. (photo courtesy of Grace Starr Photography.)
Forbes said Walton’s focus on lower prices limited margins but allowed Walton to sell more products. “And therefore, I have a larger business,” Forbes said. “Everyone is happy. We get more revenue, we get more profit at the end of the day and we have happier customers.”
He added that Walton saw commerce and philanthropy as “two sides of the same coin.” Walton also “epitomized the sophistication of supply chains — people cooperating, not even knowing that they’re cooperating together, making things happen.”
Another American entrepreneur Forbes talked about was Malcom McLean, who invented the modern intermodal shipping container. J.B. Hunt’s intermodal segment has grown to become its largest, generating about half of its overall revenue and income.
“Thanks to the container, which sharply cut shipping costs, because at the time, you had the backbreaking labor of putting things on the ship,” Forbes said. “McLean was a North Carolina truck driver at a small trucking business and couldn’t understand why they had to spend so much time loading and unloading the freight ships. And so, the container cut shipping costs by 95% and enabled the supply chains around the world, then enabled the handheld, virtual supercomputer you would not have had without that box, the sophisticated supply chains that made that possible.”
Other topics Forbes discussed were Fed policy and the importance of a stable currency.
He said the Federal Reserve’s fundamental flaw is that “they believe that inflation is caused by prosperity, people doing well… It’s this idea there’s a trade-off. You want low unemployment — you have to have high inflation. You want low inflation — you have to raise unemployment. It’s a silly theory, not based on reality.”
He said the Fed should be cutting short-term rates while supporting a stable currency.
“Money measures value, the way a scale measures weight, or a clock measures time or a ruler measures distance,” he said. “And if you don’t have a reliable ruler of measuring wealth, you get the kind of turmoil we have today. So stable money, stop manipulating rates. Let markets set them, and then we’ll have a much healthier economy.”
He added that with a stable currency, “you have higher rates of growth because you have more and more productive investment… When you have it, good things happen.”
Forbes also supports health savings accounts and provided examples of health care centers that operate at lower costs compared to hospitals. He said Surgery Center of Oklahoma doesn’t take insurance but lists surgery prices on its website.
“If the cost goes above that, they eat it,” Forbes said. “They have board-certified surgeons, their results are as good as anybody, and their costs are one-third of a typical hospital.”
Another example was sesamecare.com. He said the site has offers, such as physicians offering deals on knee exams.
Regarding AI, Forbes said that with any new technology this big, one should expect disruptions.
“The key thing is if you have a dynamic economy, you can absorb those disruptions. … One of the good things with AI is hopefully drastically reducing the time it takes to create a new medicine, a new medical device,” he added. “I’m at an age where I don’t want to wait for obvious reasons, 10 or 12 years, I’d like it next week. Thank you very much. But I think AI can be a huge boost in terms of getting new things out there.”
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