Transcript of Dr. Ben Carson’s Interview on Shawn Ryan Show Podcast

Congratulations.

DR. BEN CARSON: Thank you. Half a century.

Secrets to a Successful Marriage

SHAWN RYAN: The father of three sons and most importantly, a Christian. So fifty years. I mean, that’s amazing. And so, to start it off, what would you say the secret to a successful marriage is?

DR. BEN CARSON: I would say marrying the right person. That’s the secret to a successful marriage. You know, making sure that this is somebody that you really like, that you really have fun with. So many people, they get married on the basis of physical attraction or something of that nature, and that wanes with time. And all of a sudden, you don’t have anything in common. And, that’s a problem.

SHAWN RYAN: Interesting. I’ve literally just talked about that, as well just a few days ago. So it’s great to have your affirmation on that, and I 100% agree with that. So before we get too in the weeds, I want to do a full life story on you. So I hope you’re ready for the long haul here.

DR. BEN CARSON: Not a problem.

Healthcare Reform

SHAWN RYAN: But I want to start off just a couple of things. We have a Patreon account. There’s a subscription account. They’ve been with me since the very beginning when I started this show in the attic of my house, and that was just me and my wife. And then we moved to this studio. The team grew, and it’s really all because of them. And so we’ve built quite the community over there. And one of the things that I offer them is they get to ask each and every guest a question.

DR. BEN CARSON: Mhmm.

SHAWN RYAN: And so this is from Roy G. It’s a good question. Doctor Carson, what actionable steps can be taken to address the hospital, insurance, and pharmaceutical system that has made health care costs outrageously expensive? I’m not looking for a pie in the sky idea, but rather a realistic solution that could actually be enacted within this administration.

DR. BEN CARSON: Well, as everybody knows, cost of medical care is skyrocketing. It’s much greater in this country than it is anywhere else in the world, and yet we don’t have the best outcomes. We don’t have the best longevity. So it makes you question the efficiency of our system. We spent $13,100 per capita per year in this country on health care.

Concierge practices, just to put that in perspective, cost generally 5 to $10,000. So it is really a problem. What do you need for good health care? A patient, a health care provider. That’s all you need. Along came the middleman to facilitate the relationship, and now the middleman is the major entity controlling both of the other two. That’s where all the money is going.

So what we need to do is have a system that takes us back to the health care provider and the patient. And we already actually have that. It’s called health savings accounts. And if you have if you just modify that system a little bit, it will be very effective. And when I say modify, for instance, if a husband is having a procedure or something done and he’s short $500, his wife can give it to him out of hers or his brother or his cousin or his uncle or his aunt. And that way, every family becomes their own insurance company, interestingly enough. And you also modify it so that when a person dies, their health savings account can be given to one of their family members.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

DR. BEN CARSON: Over the course of a generation or two, almost every family would have an enormous amount of power, and they would be able to control their own medical care that way. And, also, they’re going to be very interested in uncle Joe who’s smoking three packs of cigarettes a day. They’re going to be hiding his cigarettes.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s a good point. That’s a good point.

DR. BEN CARSON: And that would save us an enormous amount of money. And, you know, the obvious question is, well, what about the people who are not employed, whose employer can’t put money into their health savings account. What about them? Well, where does the money come from? That $13,100 comes from the government.

You just divert it, and you wouldn’t have to put as much into people’s savings account. And it rolls over from year to year. So if you don’t have any major thing done for several years, you got a heck of a lot of money. And for many people, would be the first time they ever owned anything. And they learn how to manage money. They learn economics.

It would make the medical system very transparent. It would have to be because people would want to know how much something costs. You’re not going to keep using the system if you know it’s coming out of your health savings account. And your doctor is not going to say, let’s just do another CAT scan to see how things are unless he really wants one because it’s coming out of your account, and you’re not going to let him do that.

He’s going to when you want to do another scan. And it’s sort of like when you go to a hotel and you put your credit card down and the attendance is, but you don’t need that. All your expenses are taken care of. Oh, well, let me see the in dining in room dining menu as opposed to where’s the nearest McDonald’s.

SHAWN RYAN: Has this been introduced anywhere?

DR. BEN CARSON: Not really. I’ve talked to Bobby Kennedy about it. He’s very interested.

SHAWN RYAN: He was receptive?

DR. BEN CARSON: He’s very receptive.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

DR. BEN CARSON: It would completely change our system, and it’ll cost us a heck of a lot less money. And it would bring transparency to the system, which would bring its own set of improvements.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow. I hope that happens.

DR. BEN CARSON: I hope it does too, you know, particularly with all the pressure that we have on the system with illegals who’ve come in.

SHAWN RYAN: Do you think there’s a real possibility that that could get pushed through?

DR. BEN CARSON: I think so. Depends on how logical. Now, you know, there would be people who are very much entrenched in this system who make a lot of money out of this who would not be too happy about it, including some of the insurance companies because they would see their source of enormous profits disappearing.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. But that would be one hell of a fight.

DR. BEN CARSON: It will be, but it’s a concept that people can understand pretty easily.

SHAWN RYAN: Mhmm. Doesn’t sound complicated at all.

DR. BEN CARSON: It’s not complicated. We’ve made it complicated because the more complex we can make it, the easier it is to see people and to continue scamming people.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow. Well, I can’t think of a better response for that question. That just blew me away. I can’t wait to get this out already. So everybody on the show gets a gift. I always, like, really hesitant to give this out to doctors.

DR. BEN CARSON: Dear. What do we have here?

SHAWN RYAN: Those are Vigilance League gummy bears. So, yeah, made here in The USA. They taste amazing.

DR. BEN CARSON: Well, thank you. Probably be outlawed by the MAHA movement here in a couple months.

SHAWN RYAN: You better get them while you can because yeah. Or who knows? They might come raid your house to confiscate them.

Early Life in Detroit

SHAWN RYAN: Let’s dig into your life story starting right at the very beginning. Where did you grow up?

DR. BEN CARSON: Grew up in Detroit, and I thought my early life was kind of idyllic. We lived in one of those GI homes, 700 square feet, very small, about the size of my master bedroom now. But for me, it was ideal. There was a little lawn, and, you know, we had a family, my father, my mother, my brother. And there was the school that was in walking distance, and it all seemed okay until it fell apart when I was eight years old and my parents got divorced.

Now I had noticed that my father wasn’t around a lot, but he was a factory worker and a part time preacher. So, you know, he would hide behind the part time preacher part, but it turned out he had another family.

SHAWN RYAN: He had another family?

DR. BEN CARSON: He had another family, and that’s why he wasn’t around a lot. And that’s what resulted in the divorce.

SHAWN RYAN: How big was the other family?

DR. BEN CARSON: I don’t know. I didn’t know much about the other family. Still don’t know much about them, but that resulted in the divorce.

SHAWN RYAN: What do you know about the other family?

DR. BEN CARSON: They’re in Detroit. I know one of the women in the other family has told people that she’s my half sister. I’ve never met her. She is. But that was devastating, and we didn’t have a place to live for a while. But some relatives in Boston took us in, one of my mother’s older sisters and her husband.

SHAWN RYAN: Where did you live in the interim?

DR. BEN CARSON: Any place where we could find shelter, any relatives or friends of my mother’s.

SHAWN RYAN: How long did that go on?

DR. BEN CARSON: Just a matter of weeks before we found shelter in Boston.

SHAWN RYAN: And was your brother older or younger than you?

DR. BEN CARSON: Older. Two years older.

SHAWN RYAN: So single mom, a 10 year old, and an eight year old just bouncing around Detroit trying to figure out trying to find shelter.

DR. BEN CARSON: Trying to find out where to be.

SHAWN RYAN: What were you thinking at eight years old?

DR. BEN CARSON: Everything was an adventure. That was eight years old, and I didn’t really fully understand what was going on, to be honest with you. I thought we were just, you know, having different adventures. And, you know, it was something going to Boston on the train. And but it was a very different neighborhood.

From Poverty to Purpose: Dr. Carson’s Early Years

DR. BEN CARSON: Multifamily dwellings, rats and roaches, broken glass all over the place, gangs, murders. Both of my older cousins that we adored were killed. That’s the kind of place that it was. And somehow, we made it through all of that. My mother was working all the time because she didn’t like the concept of being dependent on the government, and she worked as a domestic going from place to place.

But her goal was to get us back to Detroit and to be independent. And after a couple of years, she had saved enough to be able to do that. And it was still a multifamily dwelling, but there were still rats and roaches and dilapidated housing. Nevertheless, she was independent. We were independent at that time.

And the major story there is that both my brother and I were terrible students.

SHAWN RYAN: Really?

DR. BEN CARSON: We were at the bottom of the class, and kids made fun of us all the time. And I didn’t like it very much, but I tried to act like it didn’t bother me. But it did bother me quite a bit. But it bothered my mother more than it bothered me, and she just didn’t know what to do. And she was convinced that we were going to have the same kind of life that she had, you know, menial jobs and not realizing the American dream.

And she prayed for wisdom, and God gave it to her, at least in her opinion. My brother and I didn’t think it was wise at all because it was to turn off the TV and make us read books. And we were not happy at all. In today’s world, we probably would have called social services on her, but we had to read those books. And the first book that I read was about a beaver.

It was called “Ship the Dam Builder,” and it was a great book. I enjoyed that book so much that I started reading other animal books. I read every animal book in the Detroit public libraries. And then I started reading about plants, and then I started reading about rocks because we lived right by the railroad tracks. You get so used to the trains coming by.

They make a lot of noise. You don’t even hear it anymore. But there are all these rocks, and I would collect the rocks in a box and bring them home and read about them. And pretty soon, I could identify virtually any rock, where it came from, how it was formed. Still in the fifth grade, still the dummy.

Nobody knew about this project of mine. And then one day, Mister Jake, the fifth grade science teacher, walked in and he held up this big, black, shiny rock. He says, “Can anybody tell me what this is?” But I never raised my hand. I never answered questions.

So I waited for one of the other students, and nobody raised their hand. And I said, wow. This is my big chance. And I raised my hand, and Mister Jake was shocked. And all my classmates were turning around.

“Benny Carson’s got his hand up. Oh, this is going to be good.” And Mister Jake said, “Benny?” And I said, “Mister Jake, that’s obsidian.” And there was silence in the room because nobody knew whether it was right or wrong, and they didn’t know whether they should be impressed or whether they should be laughing.

And Mister Jake said, “That’s right. It is obsidian.” And I said, “Obsidian is formed after volcanic eruption, and the lava flows out. It hits the water. There’s a supercooling process. The elements coalesce. The surface glades.”

So everybody was staring at me. They’re gone. What in the world is going on here?

But I was the most amazed person because it dawned on me at that moment. I said, you’re no dummy at all. The reason you knew the answer is because you’ve been reading the books. I said, aren’t you tired of being called a dummy? I said, what if you read books about all your subjects?

From that point forward, you never saw me without a book. If I had five minutes, I was reading a book. I went from being called a dummy to being called a bookworm. And within the space of a year and a half, I went from the bottom of the class to the top of the class.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

DR. BEN CARSON: All the students who used to call me dummy were coming at me saying, “Benny, Benny, how do you work this problem?” And I would say, “Sit at my feet, youngster, while I instruct you.” I was probably a little obnoxious. It really changed the trajectory of my life significantly. But the other thing, probably just as importantly, is I hated poverty.

You know, some people hate rats. Some people hate snakes and bugs. I hated poverty. And it really stung acutely. The teacher would sometimes say, “Everybody bring a nickel tomorrow because we’re going to have popcorn balls.”

And they were cutely wrapped in these cellophane wrappings of different colors, and they looked so good. And they only cost a nickel. Some kids actually would bring a dollar in the school and buy a whole bag of them. But I never had a popcorn ball because we never had an extra nickel. That’s how bad things were.

But I just hated poverty until I started reading those books, until I started reading about successful people, surgeons, scientists, explorers, and entrepreneurs, inventors. And as I read their stories, I began to realize that the person who has the most to do with what happens to you is you. And the person who determines your future is you. And then poverty didn’t bother me because I knew that it was only temporary and that I had the ability to change it.

SHAWN RYAN: How old were you when you came to this?

DR. BEN CARSON: I would have been about 10 or 11 at that point.

SHAWN RYAN: You figured it out at 10 or 11 years old?

Finding a Calling in Medicine

DR. BEN CARSON: Yep. And I knew I wanted to be a doctor. I’ve always been drawn toward medicine. I used to love hearing the stories about missionary doctors who travel all over the world at great personal expense and danger to bring not only physical but mental and spiritual health to people. And I actually had determined when I was eight years old that I was going to be a missionary doctor.

Even when I was a terrible student, I was going to be a missionary doctor. And that was really my dream until I was 13. At age 13, having grown up in dire poverty, I decided I’d rather be rich. So missionary doctor was out, and psychiatrist was in because, you know, on TV, psychiatrists seem like rich people. They lived in the mansions and drove Jaguars and had these big plush offices, and all they had to do is talk to crazy people all day.

And it seemed like I was doing that anyway, so I said, wow. This is going to work out really well. My brother knew about my interest in becoming a psychiatrist, and he had a job, and he bought me a subscription to Psychology Today. And I started reading it, and I became the local shrink in high school. Everybody would bring me their problems.

I would sit them down, stroke my chin, say, “Tell me about your mama.” And I was all gung ho. Majored in psychology at Yale, had interesting professors like Anna Freud, who was the daughter of Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis. I was really heading down that pathway. And by the time I got to medical school, I was convinced I was going to be a psychiatrist.

The rest of medicine really didn’t interest me. Certainly, surgery was not even on my radar at all.

SHAWN RYAN: Hold on. Let’s go back a little bit. So you go right into Yale?

DR. BEN CARSON: Went into Yale from Southwestern High School in inner city Detroit. That was a major culture shock, I must say. It was actually the first year that Yale admitted women, so there were a lot of changes going on on the campus. But it was the first time I’d seen real China and real silver and these beautiful paintings on the mahogany walls and oriental rugs. I mean, it was a big change from what I was used to.

And I was kind of enjoying and having fun and really wasn’t concentrating on my studies very much.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, what is your—I mean, must have a really proud mom.

DR. BEN CARSON: Oh, yeah. She was very proud. My brother had gone into the Navy, and he subsequently came out of the Navy and went to University of Michigan, majored in engineering. And he ultimately started working in the aerospace industry.

So he became the rocket scientist, and I became the brain surgeon. But it all worked out.

Overcoming Anger: A Spiritual Transformation

SHAWN RYAN: Let’s rewind a little bit more. Something happened at age 14. Yes. You weren’t just a bookworm.

DR. BEN CARSON: Yeah. It was a major change in my life. You know, I had a quick temper. I would get very angry. And when I got angry, I became irrational.

I would just want to hurt people. I remember one time there was a boy at school. I was in the third grade, and we got in a fight, and I hit him with a baseball bat, and I got in a lot of trouble. And I went home, and I wanted to kill myself because I didn’t want to face the teachers and stuff back in school.

My brother was there. I said, “Do you know where the rat poison is?” And he said, “Why do you need rat poison?” And I said, “I need to kill myself.”

SHAWN RYAN: In third grade?

DR. BEN CARSON: And he said, “You know, I know a much better way to kill yourself than rat poison.” I said, “Yeah?” He said, “Yeah. What you do is you drink water until you burst, and that’ll kill you.” So I started drinking and drinking, and I just had to pee so much, I forgot about killing myself.

But I remember there was another time. One of the neighbors had hit me with a pebble, really. It didn’t hurt at all. And I was just incensed that he would dare hit me, and I picked up a large rock, hurled it out, broke his glasses, almost put his eye out. He had to get medical treatment.

And another time I was in school, one of the boys tried to close my locker. I didn’t want it closed. I struck him in the forehead with my fist. Unfortunately, still had the lock in my hand for the three-inch gash in his forehead. He was bleeding all over the place. I almost got kicked out of school for that one.

And then my mother was trying to get me to wear something I didn’t want to wear. I picked up my hammer. I went to hit her in the head with it. Fortunately, my brother caught it from behind. Now other than that, I was a pretty good kid. But you can see how that temper can get you in a lot of trouble.

At age 14, another kid angered me and changed the channel that I was watching, and I had a large camping knife. I tried to stab him in the abdomen.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

DR. BEN CARSON: And, fortunately, under his clothing, he had a large metal belt buckle and the knife blade struck it with such force that it broke. And he fled in terror. But I was probably more horrified than he was because I realized at that moment how out of control I was, that I was trying to kill somebody over nothing.

And I locked myself in the bathroom, and I just started contemplating my life. And I realized that with a temper like that, my options were jail, reform school, or the grave. None of those appealed to me, and I just started praying. I said, “Lord, you’ve got to help me. I can’t control my temper.”

I had read about behavioral modification in Psychology Today, but that’s a very expensive proposition. We didn’t have any money. And I said, “Lord, you have to change me.” There was a Bible, and I picked it up and turned to the book of Proverbs and started reading. And there were all these verses about anger. Like Proverbs 19:19, it says there’s no point getting an angry man out of trouble because he’s just going to get right back into it.

But there are encouraging verses like Proverbs 16:32: “Mightier is the man who can control his temper than the man who can conquer a city.” And there are also all these verses about fools, and they all seem to fit the description of me.

And I stayed in that bathroom for three hours praying and reading and contemplating. And during that time, it came to me that the reason that I was angry all the time is because I was selfish because it was always about me. Me, my, and I. Somebody did this to me. They’re in my space. I want this.

And I said, if you learn how to take yourself out of the center of the equation and insert someone else, it will solve your problem, and it did. That was the last day I had an angry outburst. Never had one since then.

SHAWN RYAN: No kidding.

DR. BEN CARSON: But it was because I realized that it was all about me, and to change that would make a huge difference in my life. So that was when I really found God that day. And I adopted him not only as my heavenly father, but as my earthly father, as the person to go to for everything. And it made a big difference in my life.

I did have perhaps some unrealistic expectations because one of the verses in the book of Proverbs in the tenth chapter, it says, “The expectations of the righteous shall come to be.”

# Dr. Ben Carson’s Journey to Medicine

DR. BEN CARSON: So when it came time for me to apply to college, I only had enough money to apply to one college. I wanted to go to Yale. So I applied to Yale as the only college. And I said, I’ll get in because it says the expectation of the righteous, and I’m pretty righteous. I said I should get in, and I did.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

DR. BEN CARSON: So that’s how I wound up there. But like I said, I was kind of overwhelmed with all the stuff going on there.

SHAWN RYAN: What did your mom think when you got accepted?

DR. BEN CARSON: I think she kind of expected that I would. Really? Yeah. Because she knew what a good student I was. I mean, I was getting A’s in everything, had all these awards. And so she said, why wouldn’t you get in? But I don’t know that she fully understood the significance of that. But, yeah, she was happy about it.

By the end of the first semester, I was in trouble because I was treating Yale like I treated Southwestern High School. At Southwestern High School, I didn’t have to study, or I could study in study hall and get an A on the test the next day. It was just too easy, and I figured I could do that at Yale also.

It wasn’t working. And I was failing freshman chemistry, and you can’t fail chemistry and get into medical school. So I remember the night before the final exam, I just said, “Lord, you know, all these years, I thought I was going to be a doctor. And I thought you wanted me to be one, but if I fail chemistry, I’m not going to be a doctor. So would you actually show me what it is that you really want me to do? Or alternatively and preferably work a miracle.”

Now the chemistry professor had said, either because he was a very good guy or because he was very sadistic, he said, “Anybody who’s failing the course, I will give you double credit on your final exam. So you could not only pass, you could actually get a good grade and give you sort of that last hope before you get down.” I think it was sadistic.

But I was going to study all night. I took that thick chemistry textbook. I was going to go through the whole thing at night. Obviously, that didn’t work. I fell asleep.

And I dreamed I was in this auditorium. I was the only one there, and there was a nebulous figure working out chemistry problems on the blackboard. And I awaken early that morning, and that dream was so vivid. I went and I looked up everything that was in the dream, in the textbook. And when I went to take the test the next day, I opened the book.

I heard the music from the Twilight Zone because I recognized the first problem. That’s one of the ones I dreamed about.

SHAWN RYAN: Are you serious?

DR. BEN CARSON: Absolutely. And I turned the page, and I recognized the next one and the next one and the next one. I aced the exam because I’d just seen it the night before. And I just said, “Lord, you’ll never have to do this for me again. I will become a serious student.” And I did.

But then when I got to medical school, I had another problem because I did terribly on the first set of comprehensive exams to the point that my adviser, the person who was supposed to help me get through, suggested that I drop out of medical school. Said “You’re not cut out for medicine.” I was devastated. Since I was eight years old, I wanted to be a doctor. I finally get to medical school, and the person who’s supposed to help me says drop out. You can imagine the devastation.

I went back to my apartment, and, of course, I prayed. I said, “Lord, help me to understand what I should do at this point.” And I started thinking. I said, what kind of courses have you always struggled in? And I realized that I struggled in courses where I listened to a lot of boring lectures because I don’t get anything out of boring lectures. Zero. Nothing. It’s a waste of my time. And I was sitting in six hours worth of boring lectures every day.

And what kind of courses do you do well? I do well in courses where I do a lot of reading. So I made an executive decision to skip the boring lectures and to spend that time reading. The rest of medical school was a snap after that.

SHAWN RYAN: No kidding.

DR. BEN CARSON: And years later, when I was back at my medical school as the commencement speaker, I was looking for that counselor because I was going to be telling him he wasn’t cut out to be a counselor. But all of that helped me, obviously, in a very big way along my career.

But I go back to thinking I was going to be a psychiatrist. Then I started listening to some of the lectures by the neurosurgeons and the incredible stuff that they were able to do with the brain and the spinal cord. And I was just so taken with it, and I started moving in that direction.

That’s what I want to do. Several people discouraged me. They said that’s not the right field for you. At that time, there had been eight black neurosurgeons in the world. But, you know, the Lord does not distribute talent based on race.

I continued to migrate in that direction, and that’s how I ended up in neurosurgery. And I started out as an adult neurosurgeon, but I very soon started migrating toward pediatrics because I just love kids and the potential that exists in kids. And then, also, with kids, you can do things that you can’t do in adults because of plasticity, the fact that all the neurons haven’t decided what they want to do when they grow up yet. So you can do more radical things, and it can still turn out okay. And, you know, the rest is history.

Groundbreaking Neurosurgical Procedures

SHAWN RYAN: What kind of radical things?

DR. BEN CARSON: Things like hemispherectomies where you take out half the brain to cure certain types of intractable seizures. The first one that I did was in 1985, a little girl from Denver, Colorado. She was having up to 30 seizures every day. They had tried everything to stop them, even putting her into a phenobarbital coma for two weeks.

But as soon as they lifted the coma, the seizures started back up again. And the head of pediatric neurology at Hopkins, a much older fellow than myself, said, “Would you consider doing a hemispherectomy?” It’s an operation that had really been first done by Walter Dandy in about 1930, and some others had tried it. And it was dramatically successful in stopping some of the seizure activity, but the complication, the morbidity and the mortality was so high that it had fallen out of favor.

So I read up on all the literature, and I said, you know, a lot of these things that cause these people to die are things that we know how to deal with now that maybe they didn’t know how to deal with in 1930 or 1940 or 1950. And so maybe if we apply some of the modern techniques that we have, we can do this successfully. And that first operation on the little girl from Denver was a spectacular success. She was very photogenic as was her mother. It got a lot of attention that brought in a lot of calls from other people from around the country who had children who had these intractable seizures.

And we did several hemispherectomies. Got a lot of attention. That was probably my first fifteen minutes of fame. You see, everybody gets fifteen minutes of fame. That was my fifteen minutes of fame.

But then the next year, one of the obstetricians came to me.

SHAWN RYAN: How old are you at this point?

DR. BEN CARSON: 34. Thirty-four years old. And one of the obstetricians said, “Ben, I have this pregnant woman with twins, but one of the twins has a severe case of hydrocephalus. Water on her brain, and the head is expanding so quickly. It’s going to cause her to go into premature labor, and both babies are going to be lost because their lungs are not mature enough to survive.”

And he said, “Do you think you could do an operation?” By that time, I had sort of started developing a reputation as doing unusual things to save children. He said, “Do you think you could come up with an operation where you could operate on the hydrocephalic twin while it’s still in the mother’s womb? And I know you can’t save that one, but we could save the other baby who’s perfectly normal.”

And, you know, there had been a lot of talk about intrauterine surgery. New England Journal had had an article about how it would be a very desirable thing, but that we weren’t quite ready for that yet. But these babies needed it now. They couldn’t wait until we were ready for it. So I contacted a neurosurgeon in Philadelphia who’d been doing some experimental work on sheep with intrauterine surgery. And I said, “Bob, do you think we could modify your technique and make it available for humans in a week?”

And we went to work on it, and we were ready to do it. But we couldn’t do it at Hopkins. The ethics committee said, no. This is too far out. You just can’t do this.

So I went to one of the community hospitals and did it there and could see the head of the hydrocephalic baby shrink right on the screen and bought several more weeks of gestation. And when the babies were actually born, it was a big national news story. And everybody was saying, “Wow. This is incredible.” But then there was a lot of criticism too, people saying we were ethically not ready to do something like this yet.

And some of the experts were critical. That is until it became clear that not only was the normal baby okay, but the hydrocephalic baby was okay too. And then they were saying, “Oh, I would have done that too under those circumstances.” But that was my second fifteen minutes of fame.

SHAWN RYAN: What was the criticism?

DR. BEN CARSON: The criticism was that this was too risky.

SHAWN RYAN: What were they implying should have been done?

DR. BEN CARSON: Well, you know, I don’t think they had a logical alternative because I engaged in something I call the BWA, a best worth analysis. In fact, I wrote a book called “Take the Risk,” which I explained the BWA. But it involves four questions: 1. What’s the best thing that happens if I do this? 2. What’s the worst thing that happens if I do this? 3. What’s the best thing that happens if I don’t do this? 4. What’s the worst thing that happens if I don’t do this?

When you ask those four questions in this situation, there’s only one option that works. You’ve got to do it.

And, you know, I’ve asked those four questions about a lot of things during my neurosurgical career. And some people would say, “Carson’s a hot dog. You know, he’ll do anything.” But it’s not true. It’s done based on those four questions. And a lot of lives have been saved that perhaps would not have been saved by asking those questions.

SHAWN RYAN: Did a lot of people follow in those footsteps?

DR. BEN CARSON: Yeah. Yeah. Hemispherectomies are routinely done now. And at the time when I started doing them, they had completely fallen out of favor. I remember some medical students from Harvard called, and they said the professors here said that we had misunderstood that you were not taking out half the brain to cure intractable seizure.

I said, “Your professors are wrong.”

SHAWN RYAN: We are—

DR. BEN CARSON: But it’s done everywhere now, virtually all children’s hospitals. Some of the techniques have been improved upon and modified as they are in all surgical procedures. But, yeah, and intrauterine surgery is done commonly in many pediatric hospitals now.

SHAWN RYAN: How did you respond to the criticism? Did it affect you at all?

DR. BEN CARSON: Amazingly, you know, I don’t really care too much about criticism. I would only care about what God thinks. And even in my political career, you know, when people have been critical, I don’t really pay much attention to it. As long as God is not critical, I’m good.

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The Conjoined Twins Surgery

SHAWN RYAN: We’re back from the break. I wanted to dig in a little bit about what was it like preparing for the surgery with the twins, or it was a twenty-two hour operation?

DR. BEN CARSON: It was a very interesting time in my life. I got very interested in conjoined twins just out of the blue. And I was saying, why is it that the mortality rate is so high? Why did they all die? And I concluded after much research that it was exsanguination or bleeding to death.

And I said, you know, this is 1987. We should be able to keep people from bleeding to death. We must have some techniques and started thinking about it. And, you know, I talked to the chief of cardiothoracic surgery who’s a friend, and I said, Bruce, what do you guys do? You operate on little babies’ hearts. How do you keep them from bleeding? And he told me about hypothermic arrest. You clear the body temperature. You pump all the blood out, stop the hearts, and you can operate for up to an hour before you have to restore the circulation without major damage to the brain.

And I started thinking. I said, what if when you got to the part of the separation where they all bleed to death, you put them on hypothermic arrest, and then you’re able to get them separated and repair the vessels, pump the blood back in, start the heart up. And then I said, why am I thinking about this? I’m never going to see a set of twins like that. Few weeks later, there they were.

And, you know, the question was being asked of various surgical teams in different places around the world. Do you have a solution? Because the parents didn’t want to take the European solution, which was to choose which one should live and to sacrifice the other one. And, you know, I explained what I had been thinking, and everybody said, you know, that sounds like it might work.

We started having some conferences on it, putting a team together. A few of us actually went over to Germany to examine the twins, and we came back and started doing practice sessions where we would take two dolls and stick them together with Velcro and figure out what had to be done. The nurses designed special drapes that could be used so that when you pull the beds apart, the drapes would fall into place and maintain the sterility of the field.

The head nurse in neuro became my psychiatrist. You know, I would lay down on the couch and close my eyes, and she would say, tell me what you need. Tell me what instruments. She put together all the packs. And it was really quite a team effort. You know, I got so much credit for doing it, but I couldn’t have done it without all those people.

SHAWN RYAN: How many people were involved?

DR. BEN CARSON: The surgical team itself is about 70 people.

SHAWN RYAN: 70 people?

DR. BEN CARSON: 70 people. And probably one of the most interesting things is that the head of the department, Doctor Long, who had always been a supporter of mine as a resident, you know, he would have these very prominent patients coming from all over the country, all over the world. And anyone who didn’t want me on their case, he would happily show them the door. I remember there was one guy. He said, I can’t have a black person operating on me. And Doctor Long said, there’s the door. He just didn’t tolerate any of that kind of foolishness at all. But as the head of the department, he could have had the right to have done the surgery with me as the assistant, but he insisted that I be the primary surgeon and that he would assist.

SHAWN RYAN: Back to the twins. That was a twenty-two hour operation?

DR. BEN CARSON: It was.

SHAWN RYAN: Were you operating for twenty-two hours straight?

DR. BEN CARSON: For most of it. Part of the time, the plastic surgeons were involved, but we did the lion’s share. But a lot of people say, well, how can you stay awake that long? But you’re not going to sleep. It’s like being in a jungle with a hungry tiger. You’re not going to sleep until you get out of there. But after the operation, I was sitting in my office with one of the other neurosurgeons. We were discussing the case, and we both fell asleep in mid-sentence and woke up three hours later.

Meeting His Wife

SHAWN RYAN: Downstairs, I was having a conversation with your wife, and she had brought up the fact that you had—how did you word it? Basically, she was saying that you were operating outside of the law.

DR. BEN CARSON: Outside of what? Outside of the law? Oh. Maybe in a specific case. Maybe outside of tradition.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. Never outside of the law.

DR. BEN CARSON: I don’t know what she’s talking about. Well, we certainly did things that were nontraditional and that would not be what other people would do. That may be what she was talking about.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, we skipped ahead a couple of years, so I want to rewind. Where did you first meet your wife, Candy?

DR. BEN CARSON: We were both from Detroit, but we had to go to Yale to meet each other.

SHAWN RYAN: Your wife was at Yale as well?

DR. BEN CARSON: Yes. She was two years behind me. And I knew that she was a musician from a previous conversation, and the church that I was going to needed an organist. So I said, you know, would you like to come to our church and try out for organ? And she said, I haven’t played for a while, but sure. And that didn’t work out, but she started singing in the choir.

And, you know, that fall at Thanksgiving, we both wanted to go back home for Thanksgiving, but neither of us had the money to go back home for Thanksgiving. But the school said if you will recruit for them, they will pay the expenses if you’re going back home. So we were able to go back home on Yale’s dime, including their credit card. So we were able to go out and have dinner and lunch, and, you know, we kind of discovered that we liked each other.

And when it was time to go back, you know, we had been out late that night, and we had to drive all night to get the car back on time. It was a rental car. And fell asleep on Interstate 80 at Youngstown, Ohio going 90 miles an hour and awakened by the vibrations of the car as it was going off the road. And I whipped the wheel, and instead of the car going bouncing down the ravine, it just started spinning like a top. They say, before you die, you see a video reel of your life. I did.

And figured we were dead. Car stopped on the lane next to the shoulder, and I could pull off just as an 18-wheeler came barreling through. And we just said to each other, I think the Lord just saved our lives. And he obviously did that for a reason. He’s got something for us to do. And that was our first kiss, and that’s when we started going together. And that was on November 1972. We celebrate the 28th of every month since then.

SHAWN RYAN: Every month since then? What do you guys do to celebrate?

DR. BEN CARSON: We may go out to dinner or have a special dinner or special dessert or just acknowledge the fact that we’re still alive.

SHAWN RYAN: How many months is that now?

DR. BEN CARSON: It’s been about six hundred months. People would have forgotten about us a long time ago.

SHAWN RYAN: When did you decide to get married?

DR. BEN CARSON: We got married in July of 1975. Candy graduated in June of ’75. We got married in July.

SHAWN RYAN: How did you propose?

DR. BEN CARSON: You know, I don’t remember specifically. I mean, we always knew that we were going to get married. It’s just there wasn’t really any other consideration.

Family Background

SHAWN RYAN: Did Candy grow up in poverty as well?

DR. BEN CARSON: Not as extreme as what I grew up in. You know, her mother was a school teacher. Her father had a problem with alcohol, worked in a factory. So they were lower middle class. And her father died while she was in high school.

SHAWN RYAN: While she was in high school?

DR. BEN CARSON: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Have you ever tried to find your father since eight years old?

DR. BEN CARSON: Oh, yeah. No. We would occasionally have interaction with him. The last time I saw him was at my wedding. But, you know, we didn’t have a lot of contact with him. He refused to pay alimony. And, you know, my mother would take him to court. He would say he was going to pay, and then he never would. And she finally just gave up on it and just said, I’ll just work three jobs.

SHAWN RYAN: What was the typical interaction like between you and him?

DR. BEN CARSON: Usually relatively brief, but I remember one time he took us to see a movie, that kind of thing. Never any prolonged interactions. But, you know, I wasn’t angry with him. You know, I just didn’t, for a number of years, understand what the relationship was. I didn’t know about his other family until some years after the divorce. My mother kind of shielded us from that.

But, you know, even though as a child, I prayed all the time that they would get back together. Later on in life, I understood why God never answered that prayer in the affirmative because, you know, he was involved with drugs and alcohol and women and things that would not have been a good influence on me.

Perspectives on Poverty

SHAWN RYAN: You know, there’s a lot of kids growing up in poverty and a lot of people stuck in poverty today. And, you know, I think a lot of them don’t see a way out, or maybe they’re never even exposed to what else is out there, what it could be. I mean, I didn’t grow up in poverty, but I have spent a lot of time in the military and contracting for the agency that took me to some of the poorest places in the world.

And, you know, when I’ve always been very fascinated with how people live in extreme situations like that or extreme to me. And so, you know, being in Yemen or Afghanistan and seeing people that live like it’s almost like biblical times or, you know, haven’t really evolved much for thousands of years, still living in mud huts, burning trash to keep warm. I mean, they don’t really get the snapshot of what a typical Western life is like. But some of them still make it out. And I think it may be the same in poverty in the US. Maybe they don’t get the snapshot of what—they just think this is it. This is how it is. This is what it’s like everywhere. Is that kind of what it’s like?

DR. BEN CARSON: I think it’s different for different people. It’s a matter of perspective. You know, one of the things my mother used to do is take us to the homes that she cleaned. And they were usually grand homes, beautiful neighborhoods. And then she’d bring us back to where we live and point out the drunk sitting on the corner with a bag drinking like nobody knew what he was doing.

And she would say, you have a choice. Would you rather live there where I work or on that corner drinking from a bag. And, you know, she always pointed out those contrast and the fact that it’s your choice. It’s not and nothing is written in stone that you have to go down one lane or the other. You get to make a choice.

And understanding that, I think, made a huge difference for both myself and my brother. In fact, I always say if everybody had my mother, I don’t think we’d have any problems. And I think it’s so important, you know, for children, no matter where they’re born, no matter what their social circumstances, to see other perspectives.

You know, one of the things they do, for instance, in New Zealand, which is sort of isolated out there in the ocean, is they require the children in their latter part of high school to go overseas somewhere to see other parts of the world and how people live. And the poorest people in the United States live much better than a lot of people in the world.

You know, my wife and I have been to 68 countries, and we’ve lived overseas. And we’ve seen a lot of stuff, and it does make a big difference.

# Dr. Ben Carson’s International Experience

DR. BEN CARSON: Australia.

SHAWN RYAN: What were you doing there?

DR. BEN CARSON: Well, when I was chief resident in neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins, we had the grand opening of the neuroscience center. And since Hopkins is the modern birthplace of neurosurgery, all the big wigs from around the world were there, including one of the big wigs from Australia. And he took a liking to me and said, you should come to Australia to be our senior registrar at a major teaching hospital in Western Australia. And I said, Australia. You gotta be kidding.

I didn’t say that out loud. That’s what I was thinking. And I kind of poo-pooed the idea. And it seemed like every time I turned around, there was somebody saying, good eye, Mike. How are you doing?

I just kept running into Australians everywhere, and it seemed like they’re really nice people. And every time we turned the TV on, there was a special on about Australia. And I said to Candy, I think the Lord wants us to go to Australia. So she started doing some research. She discovered that they did have a white only policy, but it was an unofficial policy, and it had officially been abolished in 1968.

That was 1983. So we said, yeah. We’re going to go to Australia. And off we went. Our friends were saying, you’ll be back in three weeks.

But little did they know we only didn’t have any more money. We couldn’t come back. But, you know, the biggest problem was keeping up with all the dinner organizations. They love Americans. And it turned out to be a God thing because there were only four neurosurgical consultants in all of Western Australia.

And once they discovered that I could operate, you know, they left me largely in charge of things at the major teaching hospital, and they went out to the private hospitals. And I learned a lot from each one of them. There were things that they taught me that I had not learned at Hopkins. But I was doing multiple major craniotomies every day. I got an enormous amount of experience doing complex cases.

And when I came back to Hopkins, the position opened up for director of pediatric neurosurgery. Normally, they would go out and get somebody with a lot of gray hair and a big resume. But, you know, Doctor Long said, well, Ben is only 33 years old, but he can do everything. So I became pediatric neurosurgery at a very young age. And I had been prepared for that by going to Australia.

SHAWN RYAN: Sixty-eight other countries.

DR. BEN CARSON: We have done a lot of traveling.

SHAWN RYAN: Mostly vacation, professional life?

DR. BEN CARSON: A combination. Combination of both.

SHAWN RYAN: Where’s your favorite place?

DR. BEN CARSON: United States Of America.

SHAWN RYAN: Second to that.

DR. BEN CARSON: Probably Australia. I enjoyed Australia a lot. We still have friends over there that we communicate with, and they’ve been over here to visit with us. But also enjoyed South Africa. I’ve been there several times.

SHAWN RYAN: What brought you to South Africa?

DR. BEN CARSON: Separating twins. We separated a couple of sets of twins in South Africa.

Thoughts on Neuralink and Brain Technology

SHAWN RYAN: Wow. You know, being a neurosurgeon, what are your thoughts on Neuralink?

DR. BEN CARSON: Well, you know, Elon Musk is an amazing person. And I think Neuralink has some real potential. Obviously, it’s in its infancy right now. But, of course, any good thing, we always find a way to pervert it also. So we obviously are going to have to be very careful with the way that we manipulate the human brain.

And it’s the same thing with virtual reality and AI. Obviously, there are wonderful things that can be done with them, but anytime you have a new technology, people are going to try to use it in nefarious ways in order to enrich themselves. So we just have to be very careful.

SHAWN RYAN: What are some ways that you think that Neuralink could become perverted?

DR. BEN CARSON: Militarily, you could program people to be without a conscience and to act without a conscience and to become killing machines. I think that’s a real possibility.

SHAWN RYAN: How would that work?

DR. BEN CARSON: You would basically be able to control their emotions and tell them what to do, and they would do it without second thoughts about it. And, you know, they could be programmed to steal things, to do a whole bunch of things that people who are morally conscious would not do.

SHAWN RYAN: What are some positives?

DR. BEN CARSON: You could create a lot of Mother Teresa’s and people who would just be programmed to do good things and to always be looking out for others. But you could also program people to become math wizards and very proficient at technical things. So, you know, I have mixed feelings about that kind of technology. And, of course, I don’t think we even understand the possibilities of what we can do. But things like that, a lot of it will become more apparent as it’s starting to be used.

SHAWN RYAN: Would you like to see it move forward?

DR. BEN CARSON: I would prefer to see us spend more time cultivating the best of people by bringing them up the right way, having the right influences in their lives, bringing church and morality back, having a revival in our system, encouraging people to prepare themselves academically, creating the can-do attitude in America as opposed to the what-can-you-do attitude. Because I believe that the potential that exists in each human being is absolutely enormous if it’s cultivated the correct way. I think anybody who has a normal brain can do almost anything if that brain is programmed in an appropriate way.

SHAWN RYAN: You don’t believe in limitations?

DR. BEN CARSON: Well, there probably are some limitations, but they’re nowhere near as low as we place them. And I think you could take a normal child, and I think you can make that person into a nuclear physicist. You just have to train them the right way. The brain has the capacity to do that.

On Psychedelic Therapy and Brain Capacity

SHAWN RYAN: Have you looked into some of the stuff that’s going on with psychedelic therapy?

DR. BEN CARSON: No. I really haven’t looked into that.

SHAWN RYAN: As far as treating traumatic brain injuries and addictions and you haven’t looked into that?

DR. BEN CARSON: No. I suspect there’s probably some interesting things going on there. But all they’re doing is discovering some of the capacities, the hidden capacities of the brain.

SHAWN RYAN: Why do you think those hidden capacities are coming out during when people are undergoing a psychedelic experience?

DR. BEN CARSON: Because during those psychedelic experiences, some of the inhibitory forces that block things from happening are removed, and you begin to see and experience things that you might otherwise not, some of which can be quite frightening and some of which can be very pleasant.

SHAWN RYAN: Do you have any thoughts on should they move forward with researching that or legalizing?

DR. BEN CARSON: It doesn’t really matter what I think about it. They’re going to move forward. They can’t resist. It’s part of our—you know, they say curiosity killed the cat. Well, we got a lot of curiosity, and we’re just going to keep moving forward with all of these interventions of the human brain because it’s a vast unexplored territory.

It’s the reason that I want to go into psychiatry and neurosurgery because the brain is one of the last frontiers. I had initially toyed a little bit with the idea of becoming a cardiothoracic surgeon. I said, we know almost everything there is to know already about the heart and the lungs. We know nothing about the brain. And as a medical student, I said, you could probably make significant contributions in neuro, it’d be hard to do that in cardiac.

On Consciousness and the Human Mind

SHAWN RYAN: Where does consciousness live?

DR. BEN CARSON: Well, it’s in the brain. It’s in the human brain. It is not something that, obviously, we’ve been able to quantitate or understand completely, but it is clearly there. It’s at a different level, I think, in human beings than it is in animals. And I think it’s one of the mechanisms that allows us to communicate with God.

Animals, I don’t think necessarily have the ability to do that. And I don’t think that we utilize our consciousness anywhere close to its capacity. I think a human brain that was functioning at capacity would be capable of things that are unimaginable to us.

SHAWN RYAN: Do you think all consciousness is located inside the brain, or do you think it—

DR. BEN CARSON: Yeah. I mean, I don’t know how it emanates from the brain and how far it goes. But, you know, you’ve seen it. People who have the ability to—if there was a fork on that table over there, cause it to move without actually touching it. They’ve somehow managed to do that.

That’s part of their stream of consciousness that has control of the environment, and it’s something that we have very little understanding of. And, you know, there are people like J.S. Bach. Think about all the music that he was able to produce.

Incredible to be able to do a new mass or a new cantata in a matter of days. You think of somebody like George Frederick Handel to produce the Messiah in three weeks. That’s just incredible. How did they do that? It’s hard to explain.

SHAWN RYAN: What do you find most fascinating about the human mind?

DR. BEN CARSON: I think the ability for it to change people’s lives, the fact that you can take somebody who is moving in the wrong direction, and they can undergo a conversion experience that makes them into a different person. But are they really a different person? They have the same arms and legs and the heart and lung. But it’s the brain. It’s the mind that has changed them, that has made them into a different person.

No other part of the body does that. That’s why we spend so much time, my wife and I, trying to provide opportunities for children. That’s why we created the Carson Scholars Fund. That’s why we have a little patriots component of the American Cornerstone Institute because we know that if you can positively affect the mind, the brain of a young person, you can change the trajectory of their life.

Transition to Politics

SHAWN RYAN: Let’s move into politics. So what was it—I mean, you obviously had an extremely successful career in the medical field. And so what was it that—why did you feel called to leave that and to get into politics?

DR. BEN CARSON: Well, you know, somebody told me that neurosurgeons die early. And I didn’t believe it, so I wrote down the name of the last 10 neurosurgeons that I knew who died. And I calculate the average age of death, and it was 61. And I said, I’m going to retire when I turn 61 if I’m still alive. Well, that same year, I was asked to speak at the presidential prayer breakfast as a keynote speaker, which I thought was very strange because I had spoken at the national prayer breakfast in 1997 when Bill Clinton was president.

I didn’t know anybody ever did it twice, but I did some research and found out that there was one person who had done it twice, and that was Billy Graham. And I said, that’s pretty good company. So I agreed to do it. And after that speech, everybody was saying, you should run for president. I said, these people are crazy.

Why would I do something like that? And I figured if I just ignored them, it would go away, but it didn’t go away. Every place I went, there were people with placards. Run, Ben, run. Had over 500,000 petitions in my office.

And I finally just said, Lord, you know, I don’t want to run for president. But if you really want me to, you have to give me all the things that a person who runs for president has, a Rolodex with all the important names, an organization, a lot of money. Next thing I knew, all those things were there. Our organization was raising more money than the RNC. And it was a fascinating experience as I got out on the road, traveled to the smallest of the hamlets in Tennessee or Alabama to the largest cities.

I was impressed by the fact that most of the American populace has common sense, but I was disappointed that most of them did not have courage. Those people were not willing to stand up for what they believed in. They want to go along, to get along. They didn’t want to be canceled. And I realized that that was a problem for our country.

SHAWN RYAN: How did you figure that out? How did you figure out that the majority of people don’t have courage?

DR. BEN CARSON: By talking to them, by asking them, why aren’t you doing something about this? Because people realized that our country was moving in the wrong direction, but very few people were willing to do anything about it, to stand up for it. That’s in the process of changing. We saw the manifestation of that in this last election, but it required a lot of people to be out there beating the bushes. That’s why we were out there beating the bushes, and we’ll continue to do so because we still have ways to go.

We’re a heavily divided country, and we’ve lost a lot of our moral compass. You know, things like traditional marriage are not occurring anymore or are occurring late. We’re not having children. In 1960, the average woman had 3.6 children. Now we’re down to 1.6.

That’s a problem. You know, in terms of traditional nuclear families, all you have to do is look at television for five minutes. Any new series that comes on before they introduce an alternative to the traditional nuclear family. The values—all of our values are being questioned, and people are being driven apart.

SHAWN RYAN: What happens if we continue down the trajectory of a 1.6 birth rate per family? What is the math on that?

DR. BEN CARSON: That would become irrelevant.

The Erosion of American Values

DR. BEN CARSON: Hard to say, but probably pretty quickly. You see how much we’ve changed as a country just in the last thirty years? Things are going on now that no one would have imagined thirty years ago. And sometimes the country is hardly recognizable anymore, but I don’t think that’s the way that the majority of Americans want it to be. And one of the things that we’ve been trying to do is get people to wake up, particularly people of faith.

It doesn’t have to be that we’re denigrating marriage anymore. It doesn’t have to be that we’re mutilating little children and taking advantage of the fact that they’re very suggestible and very curious and doing things to them that will ruin their lives forever. Those things don’t have to be. We don’t have to have men playing in women’s sports. All of these things are eroding our moral fabric, and that’s exactly what those who want to fundamentally change us want.

If you look at the congressional record from January 1963, congressman Hurlong of Florida read into the congressional record the 45 goals of communism in America, and they included all of those things. Gaining control of the schools and the teacher union so you can indoctrinate kids, gaining control of the media in Hollywood so that you change the culture of America, making sexual perversion normal, natural, and healthy, denigrating the role of the family, elevating the role of government. It’s all in there. And we need to understand that we’re under attack, and we have to fight back.

SHAWN RYAN: Who do you think is orchestrating all of this?

DR. BEN CARSON: There have been people who have been opposed to the American way and American values since the very beginning. The Europeans thought that we were crazy. They said you can’t run a nation on the will of the people. You have to have a monarch. You have to have a ruler.

But in today’s world, we have to contend with the factions that still believe that socialism and communism is a better way of life, that you give control of your life over to others who will guarantee that they will take care of you from the cradle to the grave. Even though it’s never worked anywhere else, there’s still those who push that and will continue to push it, and they’ve gained a lot of momentum. You can see how a lot of the college students seem to be taking that as something that is good. And I don’t think that they really understand what socialism and communism is, and they don’t really understand how good they have it in this country and what the opportunities are in this country for success. But we have to continue to fight that fight and bring people to the point where they actually will look at the data.

We’ll look at what has happened historically. We’ll look around them and see who really has their best interest in mind and who is utilizing them. And I think that’s a fight that’s worth engaging in.

The Power of Education

SHAWN RYAN: What do you think the most effective way to fight this is?

DR. BEN CARSON: Education. One of the things that you’ll notice that the leftists in this country do is they shield people from information. You’ll notice that the mainstream media did a very good job of keeping people away from the knowledge of what was going on. I remember coming back from the airport, and I asked the limo driver what his thoughts were about Hunter Biden’s computer, his laptop. He didn’t know anything about it because, you know, he listens to the wrong news sources.

It was a complete shock to hear about that. And a lot of these children that you see on these campuses rallying for Hamas and against Israel. They don’t know anything. They’re shouting about the river to the sea. They don’t know what river.

They don’t know what sea. They don’t know what the whole conflict is all about. They are manipulated because they’re ignorant, and ignorance is bliss for the left because ignorant people are easy to manipulate.

Parenting in the Digital Age

SHAWN RYAN: What about raising your kids?

DR. BEN CARSON: What about?

SHAWN RYAN: I think that one of the ways that I think it’s going to be a long turnaround, you know, if we turn it around. It seems like we’re making leaps and bounds right now, but we’ve seen that pendulum swing really far right and really far left. It doesn’t seem to see much balance.

And so I guess what I’m saying is I believe it’s a generational fight. And you have three sons. How old are your sons?

DR. BEN CARSON: 41, 39, and 37.

SHAWN RYAN: Do they have kids?

DR. BEN CARSON: They all have children.

SHAWN RYAN: I feel like that a lot of parents have abandoned their parental responsibilities for social media.

DR. BEN CARSON: That has happened.

SHAWN RYAN: They give their kids the phone. The phone raises the kid, keeps them occupied so that the parent can be on the phone. And I mean, to me, it seems, you know, we need to get back to raising your kids, pouring into them, giving them everything you have, teaching them the values, not handing them the phone.

DR. BEN CARSON: No question about it. And that’s the reason that my wife and I wrote our last book, “The Perilous Fight, the attack on the American family, combating it.” And we talk about the fact that parents have to take back that responsibility. You can’t leave that to the rest of the world, including social media, or you will suffer the consequences of it. You know, we only have one grandchild right now who’s an adolescent, but, you know, she’s wanting a cell phone, and the parents are not giving her one.

They said maybe a flip phone, but they fully recognize the deleterious effects of social media, which has other objectives rather than raising patriotic, successful individuals.

Faith and Fatherhood

SHAWN RYAN: I’m curious to know, what is your best piece of advice on just being a good father?

DR. BEN CARSON: Well, the very best piece of advice would be to strengthen your relationship with God. You know, I don’t want to preach, but I have a very strong faith in God. And he’s answered so many of my requests, including requests for wisdom and direction when sometimes the way looks murky, which way to go. He’s never let me down. But when you have that relationship with God, it automatically improves your relationship with other people, including your spouse and your children.

And you begin to understand the responsibilities that you have, particularly as a role model, as a protector, as a provider.

SHAWN RYAN: And so how do they build that relationship with God? I mean, I just figured it out about a year and a half ago, and it’s totally changed my life. But I think for people that are new to it, they need a little bit more than strengthen the relationship. How do they communicate with God? How do they build a relationship with God?

DR. BEN CARSON: Tells you in the Bible. He says, you will find me when you seek me with all your heart. You gotta look for him. He’s not going to force himself on you, but the word is there. There are other people there.

But if you’re looking earnestly for that relationship, you’ll find it. There’s no one size fits all. You just have to know that you want it and to seek it.

Presidential Campaign Experience

SHAWN RYAN: Let’s get back into some politics stuff. So when you decided to run for president, we’d already kind of established earlier that criticism doesn’t bother you. You paid no attention to it. Did you have any fear of the smear campaigns or anything like that for your family’s sake? Was that a big decision for you?

DR. BEN CARSON: Well, you know, my wife wasn’t particularly enthusiastic at first until the grandchildren started coming along. Then she realized that we have to do this for their sake, for their future possibilities. And, certainly, you don’t want your family to be adversely affected. And, you know, particularly one of my sons is very entrepreneurial. We don’t want his opportunities to be affected, but I think we all came to the understanding that we’re working for the well-being of our country.

And sometimes you have to sacrifice in order to do that.

SHAWN RYAN: How long did it take for her to get on board with you?

DR. BEN CARSON: It didn’t take very long once the grandchildren started popping up.

SHAWN RYAN: I remember it was the presidential debate in 2016 when the announcer skipped over your name, and Donald Trump waited and walked out with you. It looked like you guys were having some type of a conversation.

DR. BEN CARSON: Well, you know, that really showed what kind of person he is because all the others gleefully walked by. And he came and stood by me and waited until the situation was rectified. He also was the only of the other candidates who complained to the media that they weren’t asking me questions. Everybody else was glad they weren’t asking me questions.

SHAWN RYAN: Why weren’t they asking you questions?

DR. BEN CARSON: I think maybe they were afraid to give me too much attention.

SHAWN RYAN: Why?

DR. BEN CARSON: Because they knew that I had good answers. You know, they complained. They said, you don’t know enough about foreign affairs. I did a one hour press conference in South Carolina with all the major media. There are a lot of them there. Answered every single question. They never said a thing about it.

SHAWN RYAN: What is it about you you think that they did not want you in there?

DR. BEN CARSON: I think they were afraid that particularly a lot of the people that they count on, many of the minorities and disadvantaged people would identify with me, and it would impact their base in a very negative way for them.

Advice for Those Entering Politics

SHAWN RYAN: Probably really onto something there. It seems like more and more good people are starting to get into politics. A lot of my veteran friends are starting to get involved. I’ve thought about getting involved. I think I have a bigger impact doing what I’m doing now than I ever would running for office. But I see them doing it. My good friend, Eli Crane. I mean, there’s a lot of veterans getting involved. And so I’m curious. What advice do you have for anybody who wants to get involved and wants to run? I mean, it’s a daunting task. It seems like you’re going up against the impossible.

DR. BEN CARSON: Well, you know, first of all, recognize that our nation was formed by the people and that the government worked for the people, not the other way around. And I think many people are starting to come to that understanding now. Many of these people that you just talked about who are running, it takes a lot of courage to do it. You have to be willing to sacrifice yourself and your family. There’s no question about that.

The Value of Public Service

DR. BEN CARSON: But the rewards are also great and that you bring the issues to the forefront if you’re a good politician and you really work on behalf of the people, fully recognizing that there are many people in the system who are not good people, who are doing things only to enhance their own position and to enhance their own wealth. It’s no coincidence that many of the people who get into our government come in as people of moderate means and leave as multimillionaires on the salary of a government worker. Obviously, there’s some things going on there that aren’t kosher.

But to be on the other side of that, to actually represent the people is a great thing, and it’s why we’ve been able to survive all of this time. As you remember, Ben Franklin, after the 1787 constitutional convention was asked, “Sir, what do we have here? A monarchy or republic?” He said “A republic if you can keep it.” The only way we can keep it is to have people who are willing to undergo that self sacrifice and to make themselves truly the representatives of that which is good for the people.

Experience at HUD

SHAWN RYAN: You got involved with HUD with no government experience. Can you tell us a little bit about what that was like? How long did it take you to get settled down?

DR. BEN CARSON: I got a lot of government experience very quickly because it was eight months before I had a deputy secretary. It was five months before I had any assistant secretaries. So every day was like drinking from the fire hydrant. And I didn’t have a lot of buffer in between, so you had to learn stuff very, very quickly.

And there were some people early on who were not the best people. Let’s just put it that way. But once we got our assistant secretaries and deputy secretary in place and surrounded ourselves with very confident and good people, we were able to move very rapidly. As I mentioned earlier, the fiscal situation was pretty bad when I got there.

No audits for eight years. And you always heard these horrible stories about the fiscal mismanagement at HUD and how money was missing, and nobody knew where it was. You probably noticed that stopped about a year and a half into the Trump administration because we got it all straightened out. We were able to get Irv Dennis, who was a senior partner at Ernst and Young. And he was reluctant at first, but we bugged him until he finally agreed to come and to get the stuff under control. It made a huge difference once we were able to do that.

The real key for a secretary of any of the agencies is not necessarily to know everything, but it’s to put people around you who together know everything and to work closely with them and to be able to take information and to use it in an effective way. And that’s where wisdom comes. I’d rather have somebody who’s very wise than somebody who’s a know-it-all and is not wise.

Poverty as a State of Mind

SHAWN RYAN: You said poverty is a state of mind, and that ruffled a lot of feathers. How did you… I mean, I guess maybe it didn’t bother you because you don’t respond to criticism.

DR. BEN CARSON: Well, you know, if you have a victor’s mentality, it doesn’t matter what happens to you. You’ll rise to the top. You know, they can take everything away from you, and you’ll go from the C-suite to the street. But if you have a victor’s mentality, you’ll be right back up there before long. If you have a victim’s mentality, I can dust you off and put a three-piece suit on you and put you in the C-suite, and you’ll find your way back down. That’s what I meant by that.

American Cornerstone Institute

SHAWN RYAN: So let’s talk about what you’re doing now. We started talking about some of the stuff, but tell me about the American Cornerstone.

DR. BEN CARSON: Well, you know, as I mentioned before, I decided I wanted to retire at 61. I failed that retirement. But after the first Trump administration, I said, this time, I’m really going to be able to retire. But it wasn’t many weeks after that election, seeing the direction that we were going in with the Biden administration. I said, I can’t have any fun playing golf all day and cruising around the world and watching my country go down the tubes.

So myself and some very talented people from HUD started the American Cornerstone Institute, which emphasizes the cornerstone principles that made us into a great country. You know, we didn’t go from a bunch of ragtag militiamen to the pinnacle of the world by accident. It was because of what we believed in, and that was our faith, which teaches us how to relate to each other. Our Judeo-Christian values say love your neighbor. Not cancel your neighbor if they have a different yard sign or you disagree with them, but love your neighbor.

The second cornerstone being liberty, the freedom to live the life that you want to live one way or the other as long as it doesn’t interfere with other people. And that liberty is what has attracted so many people from all over the world and those who try to say that we’re a horrible country, that we’re racist systemically, that we don’t treat people fairly. If that were true, why would all these people be trying to get in here? Obviously, that’s not true.

And then the next cornerstone is community. You know, the ability to live together, to work together, to be happy together. That was one of the things that gave America a huge advantage and one of the reasons that we rose to the top so quickly. And if we abandon that sense of community, we will sink just as rapidly.

And then the fourth cornerstone, life, honoring life from the womb to the tomb. And that means not only being pro-life and respecting what God has created, but also caring about those people on the street, many of whom are drug addicts, many of whom are mentally ill, can’t take care of themselves. We have a responsibility to deal with that, and it can’t be just housing first. Ninety percent of those people end up back on the street. It has to be also housing second. Why are they on the street? And housing third, fix it.

You know, most of those drug addicts who are out there, if they could push a button and they wouldn’t be a drug addict anymore, they’d wear that button out. But it’s not that simple, and we have to be willing to deal with that.

We were, in fact, on the verge of a very exciting program in Los Angeles. I was working with Garcetti, who was the mayor, with Newsom, the governor, with several of the county executives to basically take care of the homelessness problem. And I think it would’ve worked. But just before we pull the trigger, guess what happened? COVID. Everything was off the table. But I do believe it is very possible for Democrats and Republicans to work together to solve these problems.

Addressing Homelessness

SHAWN RYAN: How were you going to tackle that problem?

DR. BEN CARSON: Basically, by using some of the government land. And in California, at that time, there was a $200 billion surplus. They’ve squandered it now to provide some of the ancillary services, particularly for the mentally ill. I talked to the head of the American Psychiatric Society. He said the vast majority of those people with regular counseling and medications can become very functional.

And the same thing with the drug addicts. But if you don’t provide the ancillary services, it’ll never happen. You just continue to accumulate more and more of those individuals. And the other thing that we would do is relax many of the regulations that prevent you from doing that.

SHAWN RYAN: Does California have the highest homeless population, the largest homeless population?

DR. BEN CARSON: About anywhere from forty to sixty percent are there because of mental illness or drug addiction.

SHAWN RYAN: Why do you think there’s such a high concentration of mentally ill in that state?

DR. BEN CARSON: Well, consider the population that they have. You know, 30 plus million people. You know, that’s ten percent of our population. So that’s why they have the highest numbers. I don’t think there’s anything special about California, other than the fact that they tolerate a lot of stuff, and they don’t necessarily prosecute the people who distribute the drugs vigorously.

Spreading the Message

SHAWN RYAN: How are you getting the message out about American Cornerstone?

DR. BEN CARSON: I do a lot of lectures. We have a very significant social media presence, and that’s primarily the way we get it out.

SHAWN RYAN: Where do you do the lectures?

DR. BEN CARSON: All over the country. And I talk about it in many of the venues we go to. I’ll talk about it tomorrow night in South Carolina. I’ll talk about it next week in the places where we are doing things for Charlie Kirk’s organization. I’ve been very impressed with the young people at the various universities with the Turning Point program. They’re very interested in what we’re talking about.

SHAWN RYAN: Do you talk about this in impoverished neighborhoods at all?

DR. BEN CARSON: People from lower income neighborhoods are able to come to the talks.

SHAWN RYAN: They are?

DR. BEN CARSON: In many cases, yes. And then I had done a number of things that are on the Internet or on YouTube that they have access to.

SHAWN RYAN: What’s the response then?

DR. BEN CARSON: I get a lot of letters and correspondence from people who are very grateful, and that’s why we keep doing it. It would be much easier just to sit back and relax and put our feet up.

Closing Thoughts

SHAWN RYAN: Well, Dr. Carson, it’s been an honor to talk to you here. And so I kind of want to close this out. But in closing, what would you like to see the majority of Americans do? What’s the one thing?

DR. BEN CARSON: I would like for them to recognize that we are not enemies. We are not enemies. Don’t allow anybody to make you think that just because somebody disagrees with you that they’re your enemy. Our strength in the past has come from the fact that we have learned to overcome our differences and work together. And if we can bring that sense back, our strength will be unlimited.

SHAWN RYAN: Why aren’t you going to be in President Trump’s cabinet this time around?

DR. BEN CARSON: Well, President Trump and I are still in communication. But, you know, I strongly feel that we need to move aside people who are older and push forward people who are younger. Because does it make a lot of sense for somebody who’s probably not going to be around in twenty years to be making policies that will impact people who will be here twenty, thirty, forty years from now? I think you can work very well in the background as an adviser and a consultant.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, I would agree with that. But on the same token, you’ve got a lot of wisdom that younger people don’t have yet.

DR. BEN CARSON: And that’s why we disseminate that. And sort of like yourself, what we’re doing with American Cornerstone, with Carson Scholars, and various other endeavors, I think is very supportive of the administration and what they’re doing.

So I still encourage people to go into government. One of the components of American Cornerstone is something we call the Executive Branch for America, and it’s an online course that you can take that will teach you how the government works, all the ins and outs, how a bill becomes a bill, how finances are managed by the government, all the various intricacies.

Why is that so important? Because if you go into government or you’re one of the government staffers, it usually takes you a year to get acclimated to what’s going on. By taking this online course free of charge, by the way, you can hit the ground running. And we need more conservatives in the federal government who actually know how things work.

SHAWN RYAN: How do you think the first couple months of the new administration’s going?

DR. BEN CARSON: I’m enthusiastic seeing people actually getting involved with trimming the fat. Those who are having the fat trimmed are screaming like pigs. But, you know, if we don’t do this, we’re going to go bankrupt. And the quality of everybody’s life will suffer enormously if that’s the case. Some people are able to see that and able to understand that, and some people are not. But I think we’re making good progress.

SHAWN RYAN: I think so too. Very hopeful. Well, Dr. Carson, thank you so much.

DR. BEN CARSON: Well, thank you for having me.

SHAWN RYAN: Best of luck to you. Thank you. No matter where you’re watching Sean Ryan Show from, if you get anything out of this, please like, comment, subscribe, and most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you’re feeling extra generous, please leave us a review on Apple and Spotify podcasts.

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