Ben Carson | Overcoming Poverty In Route to Becoming an Award-Winning Neurosurgeon and the 17th United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development

Audio Transcription

Speaker 1:
All right. Guys in the studio, Clay Clark, take 417. Ben Carson intro. Go ahead and roll when ready. The mics are hot.

Clay Clark:
Okay, here we go. Not going to be nervous. Ben Carson, I got this. (singing). Yes, yes, yes and yes, my nation. You are now on the… [crosstalk 00:00:26]

Speaker 1:
No, no, no. Listen here, Clay, I want you to do… Try not to sound like yourself.

Clay Clark:
Okay, got it.

Speaker 1:
Just don’t do what you would normally do. I want you to be in the opposite of what comes naturally.

Clay Clark:
Don’t sound like myself.

Speaker 1:
Less bad this time.

Clay Clark:
Okay. So, less bad and more good.

Speaker 1:
That’s what I’ve been talking about for four hours.

Speaker 3:
Some shows don’t need a celebrity and a writer to introduce the show, but this show does. Two men, eight kids, co-created by two different women, 13 multimillion dollar businesses. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Thrivetime Show. (singing).

Clay Clark:
Yes, yes, yes and yes Thrive nation. We are in the air everywhere, sharing the truth from the booth with Ben Carson. And for those of you out there who do not know who Ben Carson is, this is the man who is the retired neurosurgeon, who has served as the 17th United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development since 2017. This guy was a candidate for President of the United States and the Republican primaries in 2016 and at times was leading the nationwide polls of the Republicans. But before that, at just the age of 33 in 1984, Ben Carson became the Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at the John Hopkins Children’s Center. His life was made into a movie and he is one of my heroes. This man overcame poverty, and his brother also went on to become a rocket scientist. So, today’s show is an incredible show and I cannot wait for you to hear today’s interview with Ben Carson. Welcome onto the show Mr. Ben Carson. How are you?

Ben Carson:
I’m doing very well. Glad to be with you today.

Clay Clark:
Sir, your life’s been made into a movie. You’re a bestselling author. You’ve had so much success. Why would you want to become the 17th United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development?

Ben Carson:
I wake up sometimes and ask myself that question. Quite frankly, there’s a very good nexus between medicine and the housing because without safe, adequate housing, it’s very difficult for a person to develop in any way. So, it’s a very easy transition. And very frequently when I was a practicing physician in East Baltimore, I had a very difficult time sometimes sending those kids back home into a horrible environment where there were rats and roaches and lead and mold, and I knew that things were not going to work out in a long run. And now there’s an actual opportunity to do something about it.

Clay Clark:
So, what do you do on a daily basis as the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development? I mean, what does your day look like?

Ben Carson:
Well, it’s usually jam packed full of meetings, speeches, interviews, conferences, a lot of travel. Going to different sites and seeing what’s happening, what can happen, listening to people, working with various groups to try to create safe and decent and affordable housing.

Clay Clark:
Well, one of our listeners, Rick Manning with Americans for Limited Government, he’s a big fan of yours and he’s been telling me all sorts of progress that you’ve been making, but for the listeners out there that are not aware of the progress that you’ve been making here, could you share with the listeners, just the proactive progress that you’ve been able to make?

Ben Carson:
Well, first of all, I would say, please go to hud.gov and go to our accomplishments section.

Clay Clark:
Okay.

Ben Carson:
And very entertaining, much more than Showtime or HBO, but one of the things that I’m most proud of is the fact that when I came here, there had been no CFO for almost a decade.

Clay Clark:
Wow.

Ben Carson:
Now, can you imagine that with the billions of dollars that flow through here? So, we rectified that situation, established financial controls. It’s no longer the wild west here. And of course, that has a domino effect on all the other programs that we do. And then we’ve also been able to establish the envision centers. We have dozens of envision centers all over the country now and they’re just continuing to proliferate. And these are places that allowed the multiple services that exist in almost every community to be brought under one roof and also to amalgamate federal state and local benefits for the sake of elevating people. Not just keeping people in a dependent position, but actually helping them to be able to climb the ladders of opportunity.

Ben Carson:
And speaking of opportunity, of course, Hud is the lead agency for the opportunity zones of which there are 8,761 home to 35 million Americans, and being able to bring funding into areas that have previously been economically neglected and to be able to really change the trajectory of the lives of many of the people who live in those places. You know, one of the reasons that I wanted to take this position is I recognized that our government has for many decades now taken a more paternalistic attitude toward the poor. You poor little thing, pat them on the head, we’re going to take care of you. And I’m not sure that that’s the right attitude. What we really should be doing is saying, why are these people in this condition and what can we do to get them out of that condition and to become self-sufficient? And that’s the way we’re orienting everything right now.

Clay Clark:
Ben, you grew up in poverty and you grew up in black America, but you’ve been able to achieve tremendous success. Can you share briefly with the listeners out there that don’t know your story as well as I do, how you grew up and maybe how you were able to get to where you are today? Because I want to provide some encouragement for somebody who’s grown up in poor black America.

Ben Carson:
Well, my mother came from a very large rural family in Tennessee, married at age 13.

Clay Clark:
Wow.

Ben Carson:
They moved to Detroit trying to escape poverty. And she some years later discovered that my father was a bigamist, so there she was trying to raise us all by herself with less than a third-grade education. But the key thing was, my mother never considered herself a victim and she would never let us be victims. And whenever we made an excuse, guaranteed the next thing out of her mouth was a point [inaudible 00:07:51] yourself to blame. And we didn’t want to hear that point, so we stopped making excuses.

Ben Carson:
And she made us read books because we were terrible students and she was a domestic, she cleaned other people’s houses, but she was really a spy because she was spying on them. She was seeing, why were they so successful? And she concluded they were successful because they did a lot of reading and strategizing and didn’t sit around watching TV all day. So, she came home and imposed that on us. And we were not in any way happy about that. In fact, in today’s world, we probably would have called social services on her for abuse, but at anyway, we had to do it and it had a profound impact on both of us.

Ben Carson:
First of all, I stopped listening to all the naysayers. Everybody around you saying, you can’t do this, you can’t do this. And the systems against you and these people are against you. Forget all that stuff, because I was reading about explorers and scientists and entrepreneurs. And I began to realize that the person who really has the most to do with what happens to you is you.

Clay Clark:
Amen.

Ben Carson:
It’s not the environment, it’s not other people. And I just stopped listening to all that garbage and started focusing on what I wanted to do, and that was to become a physician. And nothing really got in the way of that, and my brother became a rocket scientist.

Clay Clark:
A rocket scientist. Wow. Okay. Well I was a disc jockey, so you would not want me to be in charge of your rocket.

Ben Carson:
Wow.

Clay Clark:
I think everybody listening to this agrees with the sentiment that black lives matter. I think we all agree that Asian lives matter, that Hispanic lives matter, that redhead lives matters. We all agree with the sentiment of that, but the people behind the organization, can you speak to the organization versus the sentiment of the phrase Black Lives Matter?

Ben Carson:
Yeah, I think it would do people a lot of good to actually go to the Black Lives Matters website and read about what the organization is. Of course, the phrase is fine. We all agree that black lives matter, but you’re talking about a Marxist organization that is dedicated to changing the system under which we live. And people really should know that before they join any of those movement. You know, a lot of people do things because everybody else is doing them or they think they know what’s going on, and I would use an example, people who fly the Confederate flag. Most of them don’t know the history of the Confederate flag and what it was meant to symbolize. If they did, they wouldn’t fly it. Having said that, people have the right to do whatever they want in their own private capacity, on their own private property. But I would caution people to make sure that you actually know what it is that you ‘re advocating.

Clay Clark:
Brother Ben, I’ll know if this is a bad question when you just hang up on me. So, I’ll try this one here, going a little bit off the rails here. Is President Trump a racist?

Ben Carson:
I’ve seen absolutely no evidence of it. I mean, what I have seen is, when I’ve gone to Mar-a-Lago and some of his other places, a lot of the people who work there are minorities and they love him. He knows their name. He talks to them and they love the man. And here’s a man who received a special award from Jesse Jackson for opening up economic opportunities for black people in New York. Here’s a man when he moved to Palm beach, was on the forefront of advocating that the private clubs opened up to blacks and Jews.

Clay Clark:
Amen.

Ben Carson:
Here’s a man who when he became President, moved the HBCU office to The White House so that they could get appropriate attention. Prison reform, opportunity zones, all kinds of opportunities that drove down the unemployment rate for African Americans to the lowest level ever.

Clay Clark:
Ever.

Ben Carson:
Same for Hispanics. Same for Asian Americans. The historic low for women. Does that sound like a racist? If it is, he’s the worst racist ever?

Clay Clark:
Okay, now again, I believe President Trump is going to win in 2020, but then that brings up 2024, and I’m just going to give you a tip and maybe you don’t like this tip, okay? Because you were my guy going into it. I support President Trump, but you were my guy. What if you run in 2024 and you get a Trump wig? Will that work for you, is that the look?

Ben Carson:
Well, it would probably garner a lot of laughter that’s for sure.

Clay Clark:
Okay. Okay, well just a pro tip or just a pro tip for you, helping Ben Carson win in 2024. Now a final two questions for you. You’re a person who has said everyone in the world is worth being nice to, because God never creates inferior human beings. Each person deserves respect and dignity. Could you break down what you meant by that, sir?

Ben Carson:
Well, the potential of every human being is absolutely enormous. In fact, if you have a normal brain, you can do almost anything. And we become who we are based largely on the environment in which we grew up and the people who were around us, but the basic value of the individual remains very high, no matter how that turns out. And there’s always an opportunity to alter when somebody has gone down the wrong pathway. Sometimes you meet up with just ridiculously horrible people. And I always look at them and I say that used to be a cute little baby, I wonder what happened to them, but they’re redeemable and there still are valuable human beings. And when I say Jesus died for everybody, He did, and He loves everybody. And He’s said to us, we should love everybody and leave the judging to Him.

Clay Clark:
My final question here, you’re a doctor, I’m certainly not, but I had this theory I’ve been working on. I’ve spent a lot of time on it. My theory is this. If the economy is shut, then businesses probably won’t be open. That’s my deep thought I’ve been working on for a while. If the economy is shut down, then businesses probably won’t be open. Do you believe that we should be opening the economy right now? How dangerous is the virus? I’d just love to hear your expert opinion.

Ben Carson:
Well, we’ve learned an awful lot about this virus over the last six months or so. And I think one of the things that we know is that we can impact its spread by personal hygiene, washing our hands, wearing a mask, social distancing. So, we also know who are the people who are most vulnerable to it. So, armed with that knowledge, we absolutely should be orienting ourselves toward reopening the economy because a lot more people will die from poverty than would ever die from the virus. And we’ve got to be able to take that big picture perspective and not just be targeting one thing. We also need to make it clear to the young, vigorous, healthy people who are very unlikely to suffer significantly from the virus, that they should assume that they are asymptomatic carriers, particularly when they’re around an elderly person or a vulnerable person, and they should act accordingly. And if we all adopted that attitude, we would depress that curve in no time, and that’s what we need to be thinking about.

Clay Clark:
What should we do as a result of learning this information? We have a half a million business owners that listen to this show. What do you want all of our listeners to do?

Ben Carson:
I want them to make sure that, like I just said, they assume that they are carriers and they teach that to everybody in their environment, how you should act.

Clay Clark:
Got it.

Ben Carson:
That’s very, very important because that will give us an enormous advantage. And the sooner we depress this thing, the sooner we get rid of it. I also would encourage them by saying there’s some tremendous therapeutics in the pipeline, things that destroy this virus almost [inaudible 00:16:35] and the virus has gone. I mean, this is coming down the pike.

Clay Clark:
All right.

Ben Carson:
And it’s just got to make its way through all the bureaucracy. But I think we have salvation and it’s very close to us right now. So, let’s be thinking about what we can do and not what we can’t do.

Clay Clark:
Ben, you’re a great American and a beautiful man. I appreciate you for being on the show.

Ben Carson:
I enjoyed being on your show. I look forward to doing it again one day.

Clay Clark:
Hey, take care. That was Ben Carson and that blew my mind. Thrive nation, share this show everywhere because if Ben Carson can overcome poverty and his brother can overcome poverty en route to becoming the 17th U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, if he can overcome poverty en route to becoming an award winning neurosurgeon, if he could overcome poverty en route to creating a life that’s so magical and so wonderful that his life was turned into a movie, if he can do it, you can do it too. And we try to end each and every show with a boom, and so now without any further ado, three, two, one, boom.

Clay Clark:
So, if I go to drbreck.com, that’s drbreck.com stands for Doctor Breck.com, what’s the no brainer offer that you’re making for us today?

Dr. Breck:
Well, if you will go there on the website, you click on that schedule now, you will receive a free consultation exam and x-ray all at no cost, no obligation. It’s our opportunity to interview with you. Come try us out, and if you don’t like what you receive, then don’t hire me.

Clay Clark:
Let’s say that I am afraid of the internet, what’s a phone number I could call you at?

Dr. Breck:
You can call 9184942698.

Clay Clark:
What’s that number one more time?

Dr. Breck:
9184942698.