Transcript for Dr. Ben Carson Interview on the Beyond Speaking Podcast
Dr. Ben Carson discusses his upbringing, career in medicine, political experiences, and the importance of family values. He emphasizes the need for unity, rejecting a victim mentality, and the role of strong family foundations in societal success.
Dr. Carson's full bio and more
Podcast Episode · Beyond Speaking · June 18, 2024 · 26m
Dr. Carson: We've let hatred and division wax for a long time. It's time to let it wane. That means W.A.N.E., We Are Not Enemies. You know, we allow people to drive wedges between us on the basis of race, age, income, gender, political affiliation, religion, you name it, drive wedges, divide the population, have us at each other's throat. And this is a real problem. Because the United States of America stands in the way of Marxism. And they can't overcome us militarily, but they can overcome us from within.
Intro: Welcome to the Beyond Speaking podcast from Premiere Speakers Bureau, featuring in-depth conversations with the world's most in-demand keynote speakers.
Brian: Hi, my name's Brian Lord. I'm the host of the Beyond Speaking Podcast and president here at Premiere Speakers Bureau. Our guest today is Dr. Ben Carson. He's a best-selling author, the former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, a 2016 presidential candidate, the former director of the pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins, and the founder and chairman of the American Cornerstone Institute. Dr. Carson, thank you so much for coming on and joining us on the Beyond Speaking Podcast.
Dr. Carson: Well thanks, Brian. I'm delighted to be with you. Thanks for having me.
Brian: Sure, sure. Well, you've got an amazing story. I was surprised, so Cuba Gooding Jr. actually played you in Gifted Hands, the Ben Carson story. So I do want you to tell us a little bit about your family and upbringing and that, you know, difficult situation there. What was it like having Cuba Gooding Jr. play you in a movie?
Dr. Carson: Well, first of all he was very personable. He came and spent a couple of days with me, learning my mannerisms and speech patterns and even how I scrubbed.
Brian: That's it. Was there anything that you didn't realize about yourself that you only realized after you saw him do it?
Dr. Carson: I can't say I can't go quite that far. But it was fun watching him. It was almost surreal sort of watching yourself being portrayed like that. And he did a very good job. Yeah. No, some of the medical scenes in the movie were very realistic because those were not Hollywood extras, they were real doctors, real surgeons, real scrub nurses in the operating room.
Brian: Wow, that's gotta be amazing to see there. So with your own story, what Cuba Gooding Jr. and those people were portraying was your own personal story. Can you take us back to kind of your youth and upbringing and what made that so unique?
Dr. Carson: Well, you know, first of all I was devastated when my parents were divorced. I was eight years old, but subsequently discovered that it was because my father was a bigamist. And you know, my mother had very little in the way of formal education, but she knew how important education was and she really pushed me. I was a terrible student, in the beginning, but she made me read books and write book reports which she couldn't read.
But nevertheless it did the job because as I started reading about people of accomplishment, I realized that the person who has the most to do with what happens to you is you. It's not somebody else. It's not some circumstance. It's how you react. And I started reading everything I could get my hands on. I went from the bottom of the class to the top of the class in a little more than a year.
And I like to emphasize to people that I had the same brain when I was at the bottom of the class that I had at the top of the class, but a very different attitude. And you know, that makes a huge difference in what happens in your life, the attitude that you take. And you know, somebody with a winner's attitude, you can take everything from them and put them on the street with the bums. And in a year they'll be right back up there. You take somebody with a loser's attitude, you dust them off and put a three-piece suit on and put them in an executive suite and he'll find his way back to the street. So it's the attitude that makes all the difference in the world.
But then, you know, I really decided that I wanted medicine. As a child, the only thing that I ever wanted to do was to be a doctor. And it was quite an adventure. There's no question about that. But once I got academically squared away, it was relatively smooth sailing. And by the time I was 33, I was the chief of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins.
Brian: Yeah, which is amazing. The youngest in the country at the time, which is pretty amazing to me. And John Hopkins, no less.
Dr. Carson: Many people hadn't even finished their training by that time, but it just all worked out extremely well for me because one of the stories that I tell in one of my books is how I ended up in Australia after my chief residency as the senior registrar at the major teaching hospital in Western Australia. And I got so much experience there doing complex cases that when I came back to Hopkins a year later and the position opened up for director of pediatric neurosurgery, normally they would get somebody with a lot of gray hair and a big resume. They said, Wow, Carson's really young, but he can do everything. So it worked out.
Brian: What made you take the job in Australia?
Dr. Carson: Well, at first when the job was when the opportunity first presented, I kind of poo pooed the idea. Because you know, first of all, where's Australia? You drill a hole from Baltimore, you come out in Australia, you know, I don't wanna go there. And then I had heard they had a whites only policy. So we kinda shoveled that ideal.
But it seemed like every time we turned around there was somebody saying, “Goodday, mate, how you doing?” And every time we turned our TV on, there was a special about Australia. So I said to my wife, I think the Lord wants us to go to Australia. And we sold all of our earthly belongings and off we went. And our friends were saying, You'll be back in three weeks. But little did they know we couldn't come back because we didn't have any more money. But the biggest problem we had in Australia was keeping up with all the dinner invitations. They love Americans.
Brian: Wow. Wow. That's amazing. What was kind of like the first challenging case that you had when you were in Australia that was different from anything you would have had in the US?
Dr. Carson: Well, one of the cases that I remember early on was a young woman who had a very large tumor called an acoustic neuroma. And it was affecting her hearing and her balance. And they can be very complex tumors. And you know, I was able to actually remove it, and one of the four consultants was in charge of that case and he was so impressed. He said, Wow. You are able to do that and spare the hearing nerves too. And that gave me a lot more freedom with the others attending at that time.
Brian: Wow. One thing you talk about, I think, you know, when it comes to doing these really difficult things, whether it's the surgery, whether it's moving to Australia, whether it's overcoming all the difficulties that you had that were things that seem to be stacked against you as a kid, is, you know, talking about not having that victim's mentality. Can you talk about where that idea comes from and how people can apply it?
Dr. Carson: Well, first of all, I have to say my mother, who had probably every disadvantage a person could have, came from a huge rural family in Tennessee, dire poverty, shifted from home to home, got married at age 13, then discovered that her husband was a bigamous some years later. I mean, if there was anybody who was a victim, it was her.
But she absolutely refused to be a victim. She never made excuses for anything. The problem was she never accepted any excuses either. So my brother and I learned pretty quickly. If we made an excuse, the next thing out of her mouth was a poem called Yourself to Blame. And that was very important, you know, in our upbringing because we stopped listening to people who are always making excuses for failure. Or people who were saying, You can't do this, you can't do that because this is stacked against you or that. We just kind of threw that stuff in the garbage can.
And you know, my mother was criticized severely by her friends. They were saying, You can't make boys stay in the house and read books. They'll grow up and they'll hate you. But I think she got the last laugh because one became a brain surgeon and the other became a rocket scientist.
Brian: I love it. And that's one of my favorite parts of the story. My different story, but you know, my parents got divorced when I was seven, you know, single mom, four kids. And my grandma said, if you read books and do a report on them, I'll give you two dollars. And so I'd go and read every book I could from baseball to the Tale of Two Cities to everything else when you're like eight years old, and it makes a huge difference.
So I love that story that your mom did that and gave you guys that huge boost of teaching you that you can teach yourself. So that's one of my favorite things about your story there and how she had that effect because moms have a huge role. I know we just passed Mother's Day here, but you know what I guess are there any other nuggets of wisdom or things that you took from your mom other than no excuses?
Dr. Carson: Well, the fact that the person who has the most to do it, what happens to you is you. And you know, make sure that you position yourself in a way that you take advantage of your gifts and talents and minimize your weaknesses.
And you know, my mother was very, very practical. And she was also very nice, you know, she looked out for other people, people who were less fortunate than we were. And she was just kind. And I learned that, and I also learned I think I got a lot of my faith from her because she always believed that God was the solution to every problem, no matter how severe it was. And it turned out she was right.
Brian: Great. Very, very wise woman. So speaking of different challenges, you've got this as becoming one of the world's top neurosurgeons, you know, overcoming, you know, poverty and everything else that comes into it.
Then moving into the political realm, you know, obviously you've got the run for president 2016. And then how did it come about that you became the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development? And what are you most proud of from your time there?
Dr. Carson: Well, you know, during the campaign, Donald Trump and I became friends and we actually had an agreement that whoever won, the other would be in this administration. I wanted housing and urban development because of the environment in which I grew up and I knew how people became victims and I wanted to empower people, make them self-sufficient. I had no idea how difficult that would be because there are a lot of people on the hill who aren't interested in people becoming self-sufficient. They like people being dependent because that gives them a source of power. So that was a big discovery.
Another thing I discovered when I was running for president is that most of the people in this country have common sense. What they lack is courage. And you know, you can't be the land of the free if you're not the home of the brave. You have to be willing to stand up for what you believe in.
And then the other thing that is so important and something that I preach all the time is wane, W-A-N-E. We've let hatred and division wax for a long time. It's time to let it wane. That means W-A-N-E. We Are Not Enemies, you know. We allow people to drive wedges between us on the basis of race, age, income, gender, political affiliation, religion, you name it, drive wedges, divide the population, have us at each other's throat. And this is a real problem because the United States of America stands in the way of Marxism. And they can't overcome us militarily.
But they can't overcome us from within. And there's ample evidence that this has been on their agenda for a long time. If you look into the congressional record, January 10th, 1963, Congressman Herlong of Florida read in the 45 goals of communism in America. Much of the stuff that we see happening today that's creating all the divisiveness and hatred in our country.
Brian: So what are some ways that you can kind of, you know, go against that? Like when you were, you know, in your position there, what are some of the ways you said it was really difficult, but it wasn't futile. You know, what are some of the ways that you attack that?
Dr. Carson: Well, first of all, in terms of when I first got to HUD, the most shocking thing was that the books were in horrible shape, fiscally. They had not had an audit in eight years. They're required to have an audit every year. But you couldn't do an audit because there were so many material defects. And you know, with a lot of effort we were able to acquire one of the senior partners from Ernst and Young. It took a lot of arm twisting, but he came and really got the place straight now. It's probably the best run agency in Washington right now. But once we had the fiscal issues under control, it made it much easier to do other things.
For instance, 20,000 young people age out of foster care each year. A quarter of them end up homeless, a larger number than that end up in terrible situations. We were able to create a program after listening to some of those young people talk. In less than four months it was shovel ready, it was out there, giving them not only grants for an apartment, but ramp around services. Because can you imagine being eighteen years old, even if you have a place to live and no support, you're still in trouble. So those kinds of things were very gratifying to see them take place.
Brian: So moving on, I know a lot of people ask you about the election. Like what do you feel are maybe the two or three most important issues as we move towards the elections this fall?
Dr. Carson: Well, the economy obviously is a big issue. And a lot of the economy revolves around our energy policies. You know, we're empowering Putin and Iran with the things that we're doing. So we have to be smarter.
And we also have to learn how to work together. You know, you have the green energy people, and then you have the fossil fuel people, and they get in their respective corners and hurl hand grenades at each other. We don't have to do that. There's nothing that says we can't use both. Use what you have to get what you want. And you know, we have to start learning that when you live in a diverse society, my way or the highway is not going to work. All that does is increase animosity until you finally destroy yourselves. So we've gotta be smart enough to recognize those kinds of issues that occur on a regular basis.
And the fact of the matter is you can take the most radical right wing person and the most radical left wing person, they're gonna agree on eighty percent of stuff, but we let that twenty percent be fanned into, you know, a bonfire that consumes everything. We just have to have the kind of discussions that allow us to recognize that We the People are being manipulated toward our own destruction.
Brian: So it's the enemy without. That's pretty interesting. In your new book, The Perilous Fight, it's an urgent message of both hope and concern, a call to save the cornerstone of our country, the family. Why do you feel like your book is important now?
Dr. Carson: Because people need to understand that we are in a fight, that our way of life, the American way, is under attack. But it can't be overcome with bombs and missiles. But it can be overcome if you attack its foundation. And the foundation of any society, you go back to the basic building block, is the family. That's where the values are passed on. And what we're seeing now is that there are a lot of young people who are not getting that because the number of traditional nuclear families is breaking down. You know, we only have 23.1 million of them now. As soon as you look at television for a few minutes, what do you see? The alternative to the traditional nuclear family, presented not only as acceptable, but maybe as preferred.
And so many of our young people now are not getting traditional values. That's why you see on our college campuses people running around supporting terrorist organizations. They don't really have a foundation. And you know the way that's developed is knowing your history. Your history gives you your identity, your identity gives you your beliefs. If you break that chain, you're like a leaf blowing in the wind. Anything that comes along picks you up and that's what's happening in our society right now. I want people to understand what is going on because unless you recognize that you have an enemy and how to fight them, you're never gonna be successful.
Brian: Yeah, I mean that is so important to see to see that for what it is. What are some of the things that really surprised you? I know you did a lot of research into this, and so it's not just not just anecdotal, but some of the data that backs that up.
Dr. Carson: Yeah, well when you look at the think tanks, the liberal think tanks, and the conservative think tanks, they both vehemently conclude that children raised in a two-parent traditional nuclear family do better on everything, academically, career-wise, in terms of staying out of trouble with the legal system, in terms of avoiding mental illness, anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, even teen pregnancy. I mean, and it's dramatic, the difference. And then you look at some of the other rather amazing statistics, like in 1972, 90% of Americans identified themselves as Christians. Fifty years later, that number is down to 63%.
And you know, as we throw away those traditional Judeo-Christian values, look at what's happening to us. Look at you know, how quickly our society is deteriorating. So, you know, looking at those kinds of statistics, you know, you look at poverty. You know, I talk about the Brookings Institute and Princeton University studies that show that, in order to avoid poverty, finish high school, wait until you're married to have children, and get a job. If you do those things, you have two percent or less chance of living in poverty, much below the national average. So, you know, making people aware of stuff that we used to know, and we don't seem to know that stuff anymore. We need to bring people to a level of cognition where they will be able to fight and know what they're fighting.
Brian: So, for many people, there's so much out there. It can be really, really overwhelming for the people listening. Like, what are just a few steps that they can do to counteract this on their own, based on their own actions?
Dr. Carson: Well, first of all, you know, make sure you appreciate your family. You know, that was a model that was given to us by our Creator and it works particularly with the children. You know, decrease the amount of screen time each day and spend quality time together.
You know, I talk in a book about how studies show that families that eat dinner together have much fewer incidents of mental illness and difficulty with the law and much higher success rates in their careers. There's something about that give and take between people who you know actually care about you that makes a big difference. I talk about when my kids were small, but for dinner, we always would ask them to reveal a little known fact, something that no one else is likely to know. And they had a great time, you know, digging through stuff and finding stuff. And, you know, we learned a lot of stuff and it was a lot of fun. You know, those kinds of activities are great because they build, you know, family unity.
I was very busy as a pediatric neurosurgeon, leaving the house at 5:30 in the morning, getting back at nine o'clock at night, the kids would hardly have ever seen me. So I was doing a lot of speaking, you know, around the globe. I made it a requirement that my family come with me. And so they had frequent flyer cards to every airline that got to travel all over the world. And we had a lot of quality time together. And it makes a big difference in terms of the outcomes for those children.
Brian: Wow. Well, one last question here to finish up this interview. To take something from the Carson family dinner table, what is one little unknown fact about Dr. Ben Carson that you feel okay revealing here?
Dr. Carson: That in order to relax, I love to play pool. And actually my wife did not play pool when we got married. But she soon discovered that if she learned to play pool, she would have more quality time with me. So she's actually a very good pool player now.
Brian: That's awesome. Well, Dr. Carson, thank you so much for taking the time to be on here. Thanks so much for what you're doing for our country, whether medically or politically and socially too. And thank you so much for being here on the Beyond Speaking Podcast.
Dr. Carson: A pleasure. Thank you so much for what you do.
Outro: Thank you for joining us for the Beyond Speaking Podcast. To learn more about today's guests, visit premierespeakers.com. Subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen.
