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April 13, 2024 - The Michael Knowles Show
01:03:10
Racism & Liberals: YES or NO with Dr. Ben Carson

Birch Gold - Text "KNOWLES" to 989898, or go to https://birchgold.com/Knowles, for your no-cost, no-obligation, FREE information kit. Welcome to a compelling new episode of 'YES or NO' with Michael Knowles, featuring the Founder & Chairman of the American Cornerstone Institute and former Republican Presidential Candidate Dr. Ben Carson.

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Time Text
We don't know how the brain works.
We haven't mapped the whole thing.
Take your index finger and touch that card right there.
Now, I know what it took for you to do that.
The sound waves had to leave my lips, travel through the air, enter your external auditory medias, travel down to your tympanic membranes, set up a vibratory force, which travel across the ossicles of the middle ear to the ovum, where I want to set up a vibratory force.
distorted the microcilia converting mechanical energy to electrical energy travel across the cochlear nerve to the cochlear nucleus at the pontomedullary junction from there to the superior olivary nucleus coming down the cortical spinal tract across the internal capsule into the cerebral pedoconies extending down to the cervical medullary decussation into the sporadic organ stimulating the nerve and the muscle so you could point to that card.
You took the words right out of my mouth.
There are not many things that could get me to drink a martini at 10 o'clock in the morning.
11 o'clock is a different story.
But I am so very excited to play this game at any time that my guest today has free.
He is the leader of the American Cornerstone Institute.
He is the former head of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins.
He is, I believe, the first man ever to successfully separate conjoined twins at the head.
He's also the former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
He's also a former presidential candidate.
He's also written, I think, a bazillion books and academic publications.
He's also the winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
I probably could go on listing this man's accomplishments for the rest of the show.
70 honorary doctorates by my last count.
In any case, I'll leave it there.
Dr. Ben Carson, thank you for playing the Yes or No Game.
I've been looking forward to it.
It should be fun.
I have to tell you, I was a little bit nervous when I heard that you were eager to play and you had ordered a frosty glass of root beer because you don't drink alcohol.
I said, this is one of the most serious and accomplished men in the United States.
How can I have him on my stupid drinking show to play this game?
But I appreciate your willingness to come on.
Well, as long as I'm drinking root beer, it's fine.
So, have you heard the rules at all of this game?
I wouldn't mind if you went over them again.
Diplomatically.
I'm not sure that I totally understand them.
I will read a prompt.
You will move my glass to how you think I would answer the question.
Right.
I will move your frosty glass of root beer to how I think you would answer the question.
Okay.
And then we'll switch and you read the prompt and we'll play from there on.
And the winner gets a brand new car!
That's right!
We gotta check in with Jeremy about that.
Do we have any new cars?
Maybe his McLaren.
Okay, without further ado, usually, if there's a woman on the show, I'll say ladies first, but since you are very much a man, despite our cultural confusion these days, I will go first.
Alright.
With the exponential growth of artificial intelligence, it is likely that tasks such as driving, coding, and even surgery will be handled by robotics and AI in the next 20 years.
That's pretty easy.
Clear enough to me.
Well, you know, that's an area that's going to really blossom.
Something that we have to be very careful about, though, because although it can be used for a lot of good things, you know we always have a tendency to pervert the use of good things and use them for bad areas.
And particularly when I look at something like education.
A combination of virtual reality and AI means that when a kid is studying the Peloponnesian War, he can be right there seeing what's going on.
But by the same token, they can create their own world.
And it's hard enough to get kids away from the Nintendo and the Playstations.
I mean, how are you going to get them out of that artificial world?
When it's totally immersive.
And then all of a sudden the Peloponnesian War might not look quite like Thucydides said it looked.
Although you will probably remember because you were there.
You're right.
And I'm not sure, you know, there's a movie about you, right?
Gifted Hands with Cuba Gooding Jr.
Will a robot ever be, will a robot ever match the ability of an excellent surgeon to perform surgery?
Maybe of a mediocre, you think a robot will?
It will.
Absolutely.
It'll go beyond the best surgeon.
Because it's so precise and it is able to take into consideration so many different things.
But right now, go with the good surgeon.
Alright.
Then I won't have a sip of my martini.
Neither of us got it wrong.
Sometimes though I say, if we get it wrong, we have to drink.
But we get a sip anyway.
That's right.
You get it right, you get to drink.
You're up.
That is good root beer.
Okay.
The Department of Transportation would be in better shape if Pete Buttigieg spent the rest of 2024 on maternity leave.
We will get into that question in just one second.
First, though, you all need to go to dailywire.com slash shop.
We have the Yes or No game.
This is the very best-selling card game in the Daily Wire shop and in, I don't know, in I think all of politics.
We've sold about a bazillion copies of it.
We have the expansion pack of Conspiracy Theories.
We have more expansion packs coming up.
Get it today, dailywire.com slash shop.
Now, back into the question.
Indeed.
You thought that last question was easy.
Frankly, I think this one is easy enough.
I think that's pretty easy.
But, you know, there's so much that could be done in the Department of Transportation.
Have you ever thought about, for instance, you come to a stop at a red light.
There's nothing going in either direction.
And yet you're sitting there for two minutes.
Yes.
That makes no sense.
Dr. Carson, thank you for saying that.
I had this argument with a buddy of mine a couple years ago.
I had been driving at night, no one was around.
I said, I should be able to break the law.
And he was a real stickler.
I said, it's humiliating that I have to wait for two minutes.
At midnight, when there's a red light.
Plus you're wasting gas.
That's true.
It's bad for the environment.
But, you know, in Brazil, that's not true.
After midnight, if you come to a light and there's nobody in either direction you can go through, and it's not illegal.
But, you know, we have those sensors on the ground.
Why wouldn't we place those particularly at busy intersections?
Right.
So that if there's nothing coming, you know, the light stays green in your direction.
That would be a simple thing.
It'll pay for itself in the amount of fuel that is not wasted.
You know, those are the things that the Department of Transportation ought to be thinking about.
Instead they're focused on the racist bridges in Long Island.
Exactly.
Unlike Michael Knowles, Dr. Carson is not a failed actor.
Who wrote these questions?
We need to have some personnel conversations after this.
I've read a fair bit of your biography.
I don't think I saw any Broadway or soft shoe on there, so I'm going to say... Wait a minute.
I actually have played in a movie.
There's a movie called Stuck on You.
Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear, they were... Yeah, yeah, yeah!
Yes!
And I played...
The Doctor Who Separation.
Did you really?
I did.
I remember the movie.
I mean, I haven't seen it in forever.
It was actually a lot of fun.
I guess the difference though, the reason why I think the answers are still right is, you know, my biggest movies I was ever in, well recently I was in one called Lady Ballers, which is a transvestite comedy, and the other one was Holly Weird, it's probably the biggest movie.
It didn't win Oscars.
I quite liked the movie.
You're doing movies with Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear, so I guess you would have to say you're actually a rather successful actor.
Well Matt Damon said to me, he said, I'll teach you how to act if you teach me brain surgery.
But it was fun and there was one scene with, what was the woman's name?
Eva Mendez.
Oh, this little sort of unknown actress.
And, you know, they had to do several takes of it and she had to push me because of something that I said.
And she just kept pushing me and pushing me and my wife was getting upset with her.
I guess it's better though.
Your wife must have been happier that it was Eva Mendes pushing you instead of Eva Mendes kissing you or something.
That would have caused more problems.
Exactly.
Wow.
And then, that wasn't the last thing.
I also did an Alfred Hitchcock in the Gifted Hands movie.
The autobiographic movie.
Where did you appear?
Actually, Candy and I appeared in a scene where we were walking by reading a chart while Cooper Gooding was scrubbing his hands.
That is great.
I'll have to watch with hawk eyes next time.
to watch with hawkeyes next time.
That's right.
Wow.
You know, it sounds like I'm flattering you.
I really don't intend to.
But you've got a long list of accomplishments in a lot of different fields.
I didn't realize, I thought the one thing I might have on you is that I've been in movies.
That's gone.
That's out too.
You're up.
In the long term, DEI is more dangerous for the country than another Joe Biden presidency.
What would you answer?
I guess I'm going to say no.
You're right.
I agree.
It is wrong.
They're both very dangerous.
There's no question about that.
But I'm not sure the country could survive another Joe Biden presidency.
Yeah.
The direction that we're going in so quickly and so destructively.
Having said that, DEI is antithetical to all the things that we worked for and so many people And now we're trying to say, you know, this is more important.
You know, and I'll tell you how silly it is.
Last month, the Glass-Lewis people recommended against me on one of the boards I sit on, because I'm the chairman of the Nominating Governance Committee.
And we only had 25% women.
So, but think about how silly this is.
So, they get rid of me, now they've got a diversity problem.
They clearly didn't think even one step ahead here.
It's so ridiculous.
There's also the fact that DEI, it's annoying, it's It's bad.
It's quite dangerous.
But it's just a persistent liberal impulse that keeps cropping up over the ages.
Whereas when we're talking about another Biden presidency, we're talking about pretty concrete political power to actually instantiate all of these kind of policies.
It's even kind of difficult to separate the two as far as I can tell.
One is this annoying ideology that pervades a lot of corporate America.
The other is the power to implement it at a much larger scale.
Well, to understand that Biden Administration and their things that they advocate.
Just read the book by Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals.
You'll see it very clearly denunciated in terms of what they're doing.
And unfortunately, this is a long term plan.
This didn't start with Joe Biden.
If you go back and you read the congressional record from January 10, 1963, Congressman Hurlong of Florida read into the record the 45 goals of communism in America.
It's a lot of the stuff that's going on right now.
Gaining control of the school systems, indoctrinating the kids, gaining control of the media, spoon-feeding the people what you want them to know, making sexual perversion Normal, natural, and healthy.
I mean, the list goes on and on, driving wedges between parents and children.
It's really the reason that Khrushchev, more than 60 years ago, said to Eisenhower, your grandchildren will live under our system.
Right.
Right.
And they had a long-term plan there.
And we, the American people, are going to have to be smart enough to understand that we're being played.
We're being manipulated.
It's amazing how many of those points you mentioned focus on the destruction of the family, which is the subject of your new book, The Perilous Fight, overcoming our culture's war on the American family.
It seems so obvious to me, though, that there are different levels of politics.
There's the national government, the state government, but the Fundamental unit of politics.
It's not the individual.
Politics means more than one person.
The fundamental unit is the family.
So if you want to really gut a political system, that's where you've got to focus your attention.
And they have.
Right, well that's the fundamental building block.
The family, to the community, to the state, to the nation.
And if you can destroy that, which they have done a very good job of, they've been working on this for a long time.
First of all, denigrating the role of fathers in the family.
And then distorting the role of mothers.
And then, you know, taking the opinion of children who are immature And elevating that to the same level of someone who has a mature brain.
It's really just masterful what they've done.
I have to give them credit.
Those who have tried to fundamentally change our country, they know what they're doing.
Right.
They've been pretty successful.
They've been very successful.
There's so much more to say.
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Now it's my turn, I think.
Yes.
Okay.
Due to his sedentary millennial lifestyle and cigar addiction, all right, can we please get a new writer?
due to his Are you in your 70s?
"Millennial lifestyle and cigar addiction, Michael Knowles is less healthy in his 30s than Dr. Carson is in his 70s." Are you in your 70s? - Yes, 72. - All right, unfortunately, I think we know my answer to that too. - I don't wanna do that to you.
Yes, 72.
Well, but if we were being honest, it would be a sin to lie.
Yeah, your medical perspective.
So I'm somewhat allergic to exercise.
Do all of the terrible things for your health.
You know, I don't smoke cigarettes.
That's good.
But you smoke cigars.
I do like cigars.
One a day, maybe two tops.
I don't exercise, but I've been told that exercise, look, you run too much, it hurts your knees, you don't want to peak too soon.
Well, you've got to diet something, right?
No one here gets that a lot.
But what I used to always say, and I still say it, if everybody ate three well-balanced meals a day, drank six to eight glasses of water, exercised regularly, got regular sleep, and didn't put harmful substances in their body, most of us in medicine would be out of business.
Having said that, medicine is a great career.
So in a way, really, I'm just helping the industry.
I do check off one of those boxes though.
It's that I eat great meals every day because Well, I am irresponsible and unhealthy.
My wife is very responsible and healthy.
She can't make me exercise.
She can't throw out my cigar.
I guess she could, but I would burst into tears.
She can't do all these other things.
But at least I'm eating well.
Well, the good thing is you have a wife.
That's true.
I found someone to care for me.
And that's not a trite statement because A lot of people aren't getting married these days.
Have you noticed that?
It's very distressing.
And if you don't get married, and you don't procreate, what happens to your population over the course of time?
It literally kills your country.
The country actually dies.
It's odd too, because I believe in marriage as a theological and philosophical matter, but just also as a practical matter.
I focus on my job a lot.
You obviously have focused on your career quite a lot.
I feel that marriage has only helped my career, my professional life.
And even beyond that, I don't know what my life would even be like or mean without my marriage.
It's almost, even though I haven't been married that long, it's unthinkable to even view my own life absent my marriage.
I will just confirm that for you.
Having been married for 49 years, I can't even imagine life without my wife.
Can't do it.
She's been such a powerful force.
And we couldn't have raised our children the way that we did without her.
And, you know, she has a degree from Yale.
A degree from Johns Hopkins.
What makes it even more impressive, Dr. Carson, because you're a Yalie, too.
I guess we're the three conservatives that ever came out of that place.
But from the same residential college, too, actually.
The same kind of dorm there.
But I thought you managed to find this great wife early in your life.
You've had this wonderful marriage and family with her.
But truly, if you think it's rare to find a man at Yale who is conservative, kind of normal, grounded, When it comes to the women, I have a few friends from there, I don't mean to besmirch, but quite rare.
Quite rare.
A conservative woman?
A conservative, grounded, sane woman.
It's not the norm.
That would be very unusual.
And you just keep hitting the lotto.
But you know what?
I think we're going to see more of them.
You know they say it's always darkest before the dawn and sometimes it has to be pretty dark before people see the light.
That's true.
It's pretty dark now and I think a lot of people are actually waking up and seeing the light and that's that's why you're seeing the migration particularly in the African-American community toward more conservative views because they've always been more conservative but They were sold the line that, you know, one particular party was completely in their favor and the other one was not.
And, you know, it was said for a long time that the Republicans were racist, horrible people.
And growing up as a Democrat myself, I did the wrong thing from the Democratic point of view.
I listened to a Republican.
I listened to Ronald Reagan.
And I said, he doesn't sound like a horrible racist person.
In fact, he sounds just like my mother.
And I began to start re-evaluating and looking at things for myself at that point.
That irritates a lot of people when you do that.
I know.
After listening to Sam Harris, There is a greater than 50% chance Trump Derangement Syndrome is a legitimate neurological disease.
I've got to speak now for an expert.
The word legitimate changes the answer.
It is a disease.
You gave me a little bit of a hint there.
I would have been inclined to say yes, but it's illegitimate in that it's not right.
Right, and it's not a real disease.
Psychosomatic.
But it shows you what can happen to a person.
When they're hearing certain things time and time again, and how it can actually affect the way that they think.
Would you say it's, to me, another key word there is neurological.
So it might, if you actually looked in the brain, it might be difficult to identify the little orange man who was driving.
But there would seem to be some psychological afflictions that go along with this.
Yeah.
So I could see it as a psychological disease, a legitimate psychological disease.
And that's basically what it is.
But we're all sort of products of our environment and what we hear and what we decide that we're going to accept and what we hear.
And that's why it's so important, particularly in our school systems, to make sure That we're not giving children a bunch of propaganda.
Yeah.
Because the human brain continues to develop until your mid-20s.
Mid to late 20s.
So when you take an 8-year-old, 9-year-old, 10-year-old, and you start feeding them all kinds of propaganda, recognize that children are very curious and very suggestible.
So, you're not doing them any favors by feeding them these kinds of materials.
Right.
And it's really, as far as I'm concerned, child abuse.
When you're telling little boys, you may not be a little boy, you may actually be a little girl.
And of course, they're hearing that all the time.
And in fact, if they accept that, then they get to be a victim.
Which is like a bunch of gold stars.
Right.
And that's why you're seeing this phenomenon occurring in our society.
Right.
Because if you say, on the one hand, victimhood carries social currency, you'll be treated better, you'll be exalted.
And also, here is your only route to victimhood, you know, here is a potential route at least.
Exactly.
What do you think is going to happen?
It doesn't take a brain surgeon to recognize how those incentives work.
Exactly.
Great point, too, that you make on being a product somewhat of our environments, in that if you fill a kid's head up with lies and you encourage all sorts of lusts and lower appetites in them, you've now corrupted both aspects of their free will.
It would be a lot harder for them to live as free men.
And our enemies understand that.
I mean that's why Vladimir Lenin said, give me your children to teach for four years and the seed that I sow will never be uprooted.
And that's why they're so anxious to be in the school system early on and to infect the brains of our children.
Right.
And that's why we have to be every bit as aggressive if not more aggressive in protecting our children.
I'm up.
Of the government agencies that need to be greatly reformed or abolished entirely, the FBI is at the top of the list.
The top of the list.
That's an easy one.
You got my answer right, so I guess you've given me a hint.
They're spying on my church.
Among the myriad other abuses.
That's pretty bad.
Well, when you take the Justice Department and you use it unjustly, obviously that's not going to be a good outcome.
And when we're using the DOJ to eliminate a political opponent, isn't that something that we would expect in Russia?
Or a banana republic.
And yet it's happening right before our very eyes and nothing's being done about it.
That's the disturbing part.
Now ultimately, our founders were very smart people.
They were geniuses, some of them.
They could foresee all of this.
And that's why they put the power to change it in the hands of the people.
Through our ability to vote.
The problem is people don't take voting seriously.
Most people, they go into the booth or they take the sheet and they just look for the name that looks familiar.
It could be Satan.
Oh, okay.
I've heard of him for a long time.
Yeah, I know that one.
Check that one.
That's not responsible.
And we have a lot of people who do that.
And it's problematic.
This is the time when people need to be very serious.
They need to study who these people are.
They need to look at the records of the people who have represented them for a long time.
And if they don't agree with them, they need to do something about that.
And this is a clarion call.
It may be the last opportunity.
Because we can see that there are those who have a totalitarian spirit.
And in their opinion, they are righteous.
And anybody who opposes them is unrighteous, and it really doesn't matter what you do to them.
And if righteousness is defined essentially by their own will, then there's nothing that they're not justified in doing in their own minds.
It's really the same mindset the jihadists have, and the infidels.
You can do anything to them.
You can lie to them.
You can cheat them, you can kill them, and it doesn't really count against you.
It's the same mindset.
There's a remark that Pope Benedict made in Regensburg some years ago when he said there's a distinction between the God of Christianity and the God of Islam.
And the God of Christianity is synonymous with logic.
He's the Logos.
Pope Benedict got in trouble for saying this, but he cited a medieval Islamic writer, Ibn Hazm, who pointed out that the God of Islam is a God of pure will, pure transcendent will, such that if Allah, in Islam, wanted to make his followers worship idols, he could do that.
Whereas within Christianity, you have a logical God.
I think your comparison to the jihadis is apt in that we're talking about a total transcendent will.
One day they can tell us the distinction between men and women is very important to advance feminism or to advance gay rights or something.
The next day they'll tell us there's no distinction at all to advance transgenderism.
And then Thursday they're going to tell us something totally different.
And of course they assume that people are stupid.
Sometimes a fair judgment, actually.
Indeed.
I'm up.
No, you're up.
I think I'm up.
You're up.
It is more difficult to find a reason to vote for Democrats than it is to separate conjoined twins.
Now I have to answer for you.
That seems easy.
Well, it is difficult to find a reason to vote for Democrats unless you've been indoctrinated.
Brainwashed.
Then it's easy.
Well now at least I finally get to drink since I got your answer wrong.
Then it's easy.
My only reason why I would say yes, it is easier to separate conjoined twins at the head than it is to find a reason to vote for Democrats.
I'm not saying that's true for everyone.
Right.
I probably am the most noted expert on this, having written a number one best-selling tome called, Reasons to Vote for Democrats and Comprehensive Guides.
And it was 166 blank pages?
Blank pages, yes.
Now, I'm sitting across from an expert in a different field, separating conjoined twins at the head.
My only point is, you successfully accomplished your task.
I failed.
I did not find a single reason.
And so, it just seems to me, I'll drink anyway, since I got your answer.
I'm up.
No one has a clue how the brain really works.
Hmm.
That's a provocative question.
That's the whole question?
That's the whole prompt, at least.
No one has a clue how the brain really works.
I would deny my profession if I said yes to that.
I would say... Okay, my... Hmm.
I'm somewhat overthinking it, because I want to say you got my answer wrong and I want to put yes, but then ultimately I think I'm actually going to put it as no.
My argument being, obviously, we have some idea how the brain works.
Well, I don't, but you do.
Well, we certainly wouldn't be opening up people's heads and operating on it if we didn't know.
We had no idea.
But if the question is taken to be, ultimately, we don't know how the brain works, we haven't mapped the whole thing, we don't know exactly, I suppose then you might flip it.
But then furthermore, I do think we have an idea of how the brain works in the sense that we know that human beings are body and soul, and we know that our physical bodies reflect a metaphysical reality, and we know that we are rational creatures with a free will.
That's quite abstracted from, you know, scissors.
But we know nuts and bolts.
We know nuts and bolts.
For instance, I say to you, take your index finger and touch that card right there.
Now, I know what it took for you to do that.
The sound waves had to leave my lips, travel through the air, enter your external auditory medias, travel down to your tympanic membrane, set up a vibratory force, which traveled across the ossicles of the middle ear to the ovarian realm with a sudden vibratory force, distorted the microcilia, converting mechanical energy to electrical energy, to travel across the cochlear nerve to the cochlear nucleus at the pontomadular junction, from there to the superior olivary nucleus, ascending bilaterally up the brainstems of the lateral and that's gets to the inferior colliculus and the mediogeniculate nuclei.
Across the thalamic radiations to the posterior temporal lobes begin the auditory process and from bed to the frontal lobes down the tractors, to retrieve the memory from the metohippocampal structure in the mammary bodies, back to the frontal lobes to start the motor response at the bed cell level, coming down the corticospinal tract across the internal capsule, into the cerebral P-dough and extending coming down the corticospinal tract across the internal capsule, into the cerebral P-dough and extending down to the cervical medullary decussation into the spratagorgary matter, stimulating So you could point to that card.
You took the words right out of my mouth.
It was on the tip of my tongue.
But of course.
But my point being, we know a lot about the brain.
We just don't know all there is to know about it.
But that is more, you're right, I'm willing to wager that is more than, more than nothing.
More than nothing.
Europe.
I'll drink anyway just to try to understand The euphonium is for people who can't handle the tuba.
For those who don't know, the euphonium is a baritone.
Well, I think I know your answer.
It better be.
I did not know that you play the euphonium.
I did.
I played the euphonium in high school, and I was actually rather skillful.
In fact, I was offered a scholarship to Interlochen, which is a music camp in Michigan for very talented musicians.
And my band teacher, even though it would have been a big feather in his cap, he said, Benny, don't accept it because you're going to be a great doctor and I don't want you to get distracted.
Wow.
There are some very good teachers.
Who actually care a lot more about their students than they do about their own accolades.
That was a good example of them.
There have been a lot of good teachers that I've encountered over the course of time.
Unfortunately, many teachers have also subscribed to Marxist-like tendencies.
The teacher unions have subscribed to Marxist philosophies.
And we have a problem and that's why there's such an explosion right now of charter schools.
You're right.
Home schools, faith-based schools, trying to avert some of the damage that those people can do to our kids.
Do you ever regret passing on the high-flying euphonium star lifestyle?
The groupies?
I don't because I still get to enjoy the music because my wife is a musician.
What does she play?
She's a violinist.
And she was playing at a concert here last night with the Nashville Praise Symphony.
I strum a guitar, a little ukulele every now and again, but then you really raise the bar with the euphonium and the violin.
Well, my kids all played.
My wife had them all playing string instruments as they were growing up.
One on the violin, one on the viola, one on the cello.
You have a nice little trio.
And then she plays violin, so they had a string quartet.
They performed in lots of different places.
It was really quite amazing.
I do love, I played violin as a child.
I feared that I would pop whatever the first step of your brain working.
I would explode it if I played it for you right now.
But I love the way you put it with music.
You say, well I still get to enjoy the music.
In an amateur way.
And I think, you know, amateur means lover, you know, like amatuer.
And that's how I enjoy music.
I think that's a wonderful thing.
If I were a professional musician, I'd probably be totally miserable.
But because I get to strum a little bit with my kids, it's lovely.
Well, when my middle son, who played cello, would play with his mom, I would call their act, "Yo, yo, ma, and yo, ma, ma." That would sell.
If you released an album with that, that would sell.
Dr. Ben Carson is known for beating the odds throughout his life.
However, graduating from Yale University and joining the Navy while being married to a woman might have been statistically the greatest improbability.
Dr. Carson, I don't know if you've heard some of the pop culture Rumors about Yale.
They suggest that Yalies are a touch light in the loafers.
They make the same kind of arguments about the Navy.
My grandfather was a Navy captain.
Okay, a lot of family in the Navy.
And as a graduate of Yale, I would like to be offended on your behalf for that extremely insulting question, even if statistically there might be some truth to it to acknowledge.
Well, I was never in the Navy.
You were never in the... Okay, so they got that part wrong.
I don't know where that came from.
My brother was in the Navy.
Married to a woman.
He is married to a woman.
Okay, alright, so he beat the odds too.
So, okay, we still have to answer.
Well, read the question again.
Okay, alright, I want to get the wording right.
I think we have to cancel that question since it's based on inappropriate information.
It's based on a false premise.
Navy, you can tell the quality of researchers we have here in the producer room.
While being married to a woman might have been statistically the greatest improbability.
I think we have to cancel that question since it's based on inappropriate information.
It's based on a false premise.
Yes, I agree.
And also, when they talk about Yale, they say one in four may be more.
Statistically, the odds of becoming the greatest neurosurgeon in the country are actually tougher odds than all of that.
You're up.
Potentially.
Ooh, that's a long one.
The first thing we should do to help overcome our culture's war on the American family is to reform divorce laws to be more fair to men and encourage women To not get tattoos or start OnlyFans accounts.
There is a slight tie-in here.
I recently had a debate with a young woman who, she might put it differently, but it seems that she discourages men from getting married because the divorce laws, divorce laws obviously are quite unfair and not conducive to flourishing today, but she says, Basically, until those divorce laws change, it's a bad idea to get married.
Whereas I say, it's always a good idea to get married, you know, be fruitful and multiply, what God has joined, let no man separate.
It's a good idea to get married, but people need to understand marriage.
And, you know, when two people get married, it's like taking two pieces of sandpaper and rubbing them together.
There's going to be friction.
Okay, but you've got to keep rubbing them together until they become smooth.
And, you know, no-fault divorce and all these easy ways of getting out of it, it's not very helpful.
And I remember as a child how hurtful it was when my parents got divorced.
Every night I prayed that they would get back together.
They never did.
And of course as I got older I understood why, because my father was a bigamist.
So that could never have worked, obviously.
Wow.
So he previously had been married?
He was.
Wow.
He married my mother when she was 13 years old.
And, you know, she was happy to do that because trying to escape from dire poverty in rural Tennessee, a large family where she was shuffled from home to home.
She was just trying to get out of there.
She had less than a third grade education.
But I'll tell you an interesting thing about my mother with all that going on.
She never played the victim.
She never made excuses.
She never felt sorry for herself.
The problem was she never felt sorry for us either.
And there's really no, when you say, you know,ouch, mom, I scraped my knee today, or I'm too tired of you.
Oh, really?
I have a third grade education.
I escaped poverty at 13.
I don't want to hear it, kids.
That's exactly right.
I do love that attitude, though, that you're describing of her, which is I basically think there is no reason ever to whine about anything.
If you're going to criticize something as a political matter and then try to fix that, I'm all for it.
But just kind of whining about any slight that happens to you, I think basically in all circumstances, it's not going to help you.
But I'm for anything that will preserve marriage.
Right, right.
Put divorce on the back burner.
Yeah.
The reason, sometimes people don't, they say, why divorce law?
There's so many other problems in the country.
The border, the this, the economy, the this.
And I think, right, I understand.
It seems a little abstracted, but it's what we were talking about earlier.
The family is the building block of the whole political order.
If you fracture that, you can never have a stable political order.
It's just not possible.
Right.
And understand that that's where children get their values from.
That's where they get their self-worth from.
And one of the reasons that the social media and all these things have become so powerful is because children are not getting their solid foundation and base from their family.
They're going to look for some place to get it.
And unfortunately those places frequently are not good places.
Right.
Right.
Okay, I think I'm up.
Nicotine, in its pure form, is more beneficial for the human brain than CBD oil.
Okay, so we're talking about two substances, one a derivative of tobacco, one a derivative of the Haitian oregano, the devil's lettuce, the sin spinach, as some call it.
Nicotine is more beneficial than, or less harmful, say.
Well, let's put it this way.
Nicotine is one of the most addictive substances known to man.
Even more addictive than the ingredients of that joint that people smoke.
Well with that hint, I'm going to say you will say no.
I think you're correct.
My answer?
Dr. Carson, I may finally have pulled ahead in this game.
Because... Now, say it's just my own bias because I like cigars and have a cigar company, Mayflower Cigars.
I'm not saying either are beneficial necessarily, but nicotine sharpens your senses.
For better or worse.
Whereas marijuana dulls your senses.
The best thing that comes out of marijuana is it makes you appreciate Doritos more than you previously did.
So I guess I'm saying if you had to choose between the two, I would recommend nicotine.
And I know that marijuana is not Physically all that addictive, but habitually, psychologically, I find people who get into the old, you know, Peruvian parsley, they, it consumes their life.
It's all they ever want to talk about.
Right.
Well, you have to also consider the other effects other than the mental effects.
Nicotine, very detrimental to your lungs, to your upper respiratory tract.
What if you just do those pouches though?
I'm trying to find any way around.
To your heart, it's probably not great for your heart.
No, it's not good for your heart either.
And your blood vessels in general.
There's a disease called Burger's Disease that's exacerbated by smoking and it causes the little blood vessels and even the smallest blood vessels to close.
And you see people actually losing the ends of their fingers, sometimes their whole finger.
And I've seen pictures of people and they're still smoking with their stumps.
They're holding the cigarette.
That's how addictive it can be.
I have a friend who doesn't smoke cigarettes, so it's not the lung issues, but he takes those pouches, and I said, you're taking a lot of those pouches.
I'll try one every now and again, but I don't buy them or anything.
And he said, oh yeah, I have them all the time.
I tell you though, sometimes I wake up, you know, my fingers are a little like tingly.
I don't really feel my, that's very scary.
It could be starting.
Well, the best thing, don't do either.
That seems like maybe sound medical advice.
Alright, whose turn is it?
I think it's your turn, Dr. Carson.
Okay.
Due to biological advantages, men should be barred from competing in women's chess competitions.
Is there any way to get out of answering this question without losing my show?
That's a bad one.
That's a tough one.
I'm hearing skip it from off camera.
Is that a certain Mrs. Carson I hear?
Due to biological advantages.
Okay, no I have my answer.
I have my answer that I think is going to prevent me from being cancelled on this show.
And I think is defensible.
Your answer?
Why not?
I'll go for yes.
Well, there are... I'm going to say no.
Yes.
Correct.
Men should be... because I don't think there are any biological advantages.
Okay, so I got it.
I have to drink again.
Now, I guess... When it comes to intellect, there are biological advantages when it comes to strength.
Yes.
But not to intellect.
So my argument as to why maybe one could have answered yes is actually the argument for ultimately answering no, I think, which is the Larry Summers argument.
The reason he got thrown out of Harvard is he said, well, look, the paucity of women in certain academic fields, their relative scarcity, is because Well, I take it even further.
of the bell curve.
The smartest people are men.
But that means that the low end, because the bell curve is wider for men, that means that also the dumbest people on earth are going to be men as well.
And women just kind of have it a little bit more together in the middle.
So, but because of that, then that means that the average and median woman is going to be just as intelligent as the average and median man.
Well, I take it even further.
I go back to religion.
When God created, man and woman.
How did he create woman?
Thank you.
The rib.
Not the skull.
Not the foot.
The rib.
The side.
Equal.
Also, I'm not saying that women can't sometimes be taken to flights of fancy, occasionally be a little irrational, but generally speaking, I have found women to be a bit more pragmatic, to think in a more pragmatic way sometimes than men do.
Sometimes when my wife and I are trying to figure out a course of action, she will often be the more grounded one.
I will be a little bit more the idealistic one.
More practical.
Yeah.
I think that's largely true.
Also, I don't play chess.
I never learned how to play chess.
It's an embarrassment.
I was on the Yale chess team.
Well, then we're definitely not playing chess today.
What are we doing on the score here?
I'm sure I'm losing.
I'm losing by one.
I'm glad I'm not getting totally blown out of the water.
If Congress can send $113 billion in aid to Ukraine, then we can at least spend half that to build a wall at our southern border.
Dr. Carson, we're about to tie up this game.
Because, I'm going to say no.
Really?
The reason is, not because we shouldn't do that, we obviously should do that.
It just seems we can't.
It just seems, politically, we are incapable of the most basic functions of the government.
Well, it is kind of sad, but there must be a reason that this administration is willing to subject the American people to what is going to be a horrendous situation because of the people who are coming in through our border, many of whom have very nefarious purposes.
And they're going to inflict tremendous harm on us.
And what excuse will they give at that point for having let all those people in?
No, because they pretend that all those people Some of whom are from the Middle East, some of whom are from China, some of whom are from all over the place, all of whom have worked with the criminal cartels which control the border.
Let's say those people, they're just dreamers, you know, escaping political repression in Honduras or something.
Would they say that about their own home in which they had children?
If all of a sudden the prisons let everybody out?
And a whole bunch of people came to their house and said, I like your house, I want to live here.
I'm going to eat your food, I'm going to sleep in your bed, and I'm going to do all these things.
But it won't happen to their house.
It's going to happen in El Paso, then they'll send them to politically convenient places around the country.
Exactly.
Right.
You're up.
Okay.
I'll drink anyway.
Me too.
I don't eat it.
You might want to try root beer next time.
I think, especially for 10 o'clock in the morning, that might be a little more fitting.
Dr. Carson has a great Trump story to tell from working at the White House.
So the prompt is, Dr. Carson has a great Trump story to tell.
I imagine your answer is going to be yes.
What's my answer?
Your answer's going to be yes, too.
I want to take another point.
My answer is no.
You will not have a great Trump story.
I bet you will have about 200 great Trump stories.
That's a very good point.
Could I inquire into one or two of them?
Well, I'll tell you a great Trump story.
Let's just show you what kind of sense of humor he has.
He was telling Candy and I, he said, You know, years ago, I would be in a hotel and it would be midnight and there'd be a knock on my door.
I'd say, who's knocking on my door at midnight?
He'd open the door and there'd be this gorgeous woman throwing herself at him.
And he said, but I was good.
Most of the time.
Yeah.
So it's sort of like the Ben Franklin autobiography in which he says that he decided that he was going to become a paragon of virtue.
He was a young man.
He decided he was going to work, and he was going to have the strength of so-and-so, and the prudence of so-and-so, and the humility of Socrates and Jesus, to whom he's comparing himself.
But then he says, you know, and along the way on my path to virtue, occasionally a woman fell into my path.
And I said, oh, just sort of fell from the sky?
How did that happen?
Well, Benjamin Franklin was an amazing guy.
He was a genius, along with Thomas Jefferson and some of the others.
Their ability to foresee things and to propose solutions was pretty amazing.
And especially in the case of Franklin, he was just a total polymath, right?
You know, he was a publisher, a politician, an inventor, a diplomat, a scientist, everything.
Unbelievable.
And that had a lot to do with, I think, our success as a nation.
Putting, you know, those correct principles in place.
And, you know, what we need to think about in this nation right now Why is it that so many people wanted to come here?
Even now, when people say how horrible we are, you still see people trying to flood in here.
Yeah.
Which tells you something, doesn't it?
Right.
All the people who always say, I'm going to move to Canada if Trump gets elected.
They never do, do they?
They never make good on that promise, much to my dismay.
Well, you know, Candy and I have traveled to 68 countries.
We've lived overseas.
We lived for a year in Australia.
And I can tell you, there's no place like this country and that's why we really need to put all of our effort into preserving it.
And those people who are trying to fundamentally change this nation are not our friends.
And, you know, we need to know what we're up against.
And, you know, people say, don't talk about politics and don't talk about religion.
Those are the very things we need to be talking about.
We need to be talking about the things that are fundamental to who we became as a nation.
What are we supposed to talk about, the Yankees?
I like the Yankees, but, you know.
You're supposed to talk about Hollywood and sports, and not talk about the important things.
Particularly don't talk about them to your children.
And they become very easy prey for those who do talk about them.
Right, right.
It's funny, we're chatting on my birthday, and on my birthday, I think about death.
But I think, because I'm born, and so a consequence of my being born is I'm going to die one day.
None of us get out of life without dying.
We don't!
That's where we're headed.
And I think, okay, well, am I doing the things I want to be doing?
Am I accomplishing the things I want to accomplish?
But it's important for people to think about final things, because it's only when you think about final things But all the other things come into perspective.
What are we here for?
What are we doing?
What is my purpose here?
How ought we to live while we are here?
Otherwise, it's just all hollering at the sports.
It's hard to actually have a good answer to that if you don't believe in something, if you don't have faith, and if you don't see something bigger than yourself.
For a lot of people, themselves, that's the end all.
So that's why they try to spend everything on themselves and everything is central to them.
I don't see how that can ever bring happiness to anyone.
Right.
Right.
The greatest things are things that you do for others and the way that you improve your environment.
I remember about a year ago I was in the airport and a guy comes running up to me.
He says, Dr. Carson, Dr. Carson, you won't remember me, but 30 years ago, you operated on my daughter.
She was three years old.
She had a malignant brain tumor.
Everybody said she was going to die.
And last week we celebrated her 33rd birthday.
You know, those are cool things.
Wow.
You're right, I don't remember you, but I'm glad you came up to me.
I'm glad it worked out.
Absolutely.
But what we can do in our environment to improve it for others, that's the only thing that I think brings real happiness.
Stuff doesn't do it.
I can tell you from having grown up in dire poverty to now when, you know, we're very affluent people now.
That doesn't bring happiness.
What brings happiness is the relationships that you have with other people and the things that you do in your environment.
Right, right.
They have not figured out a way to take it with them yet.
Maybe when you figure out how to take it with you, maybe that'll change, but I wouldn't hold my breath for it.
You're right.
Or is it you?
You're the last question.
I'm the last question.
If Michael Nose had chosen to become a neurosurgeon, He would have made the world a better place.
He wouldn't have been a good doctor, but at least he wouldn't be doing political commentary.
I think Ben Shapiro wrote these questions.
It wasn't Ben Davies, it was Ben Shapiro.
Well, okay.
He would have made the world a better place.
Well, you would have made the world a better place.
That's true.
I was about to answer no for you.
Well, that part is true.
You would have made the world a better place.
But I'm not sure that you wouldn't have been a good doctor.
You would have been a good doctor.
You would have been a good doctor.
Thank you.
So take that, producers, you big jerks.
Dr. Ben Carson, one of the biggest, most important doctors in America, says I would have been good.
So, take that.
That's great.
I would have gotten that wrong anyway.
I'm sure you beat me at the game.
I don't even know what the score is.
I am going to toast to that.
That's very kind of you to end with a compliment.
Alright, even the four sips I've had of this have been a little much.
Maybe I'll eat the olive and that can be my breakfast.
Dr. Carson?
This was truly among the top birthday gifts I could have gotten to meet you today to find out that not only are you a man that I've admired for a long time, But you're even more admirable because you managed to make it out of that crazy institution in New Haven and have such an amazing and important career.
Well, let's pray for our alma mater.
And our country.
They have sort of gone a little bit over the deep end.
But there are good people there.
And, you know, it started out as an institution that prepared ministers.
For God, for country, and for Yale was the slogan.
You look at Harvard, you look at all of these things, they all started out that way.
And look what's happened over the course of time.
And it's happening largely because people remain silent.
I think the majority of Americans actually think logically and have common sense.
What is missing is courage.
People don't want to be canceled.
They don't want to be called a nasty name.
But what they have to remember is you cannot be the land of the free if you're not the home of the brave.
Courage being the prerequisite of all of the virtues.
And my friend Andrew Klavan sometimes points out, the problem is not so much that our elites, whether we're talking about at a university or in the government or media or wherever, it's not that our elites won't practice what they preach, it's that they won't preach what they practice.
In that the elites still know It's good to get married.
It's good to have a family.
It's good to focus on education.
It's good to work hard.
It's good to better yourself.
They know that.
They do that for themselves.
They just tell everyone else not to do it.
They give them terrible advice.
They brainwash them.
And it's no wonder when those people have much more difficult lives.
Absolutely.
The book, The Perilous Fight.
The book talks a lot about what you just said.
It goes into deep explanations, gives the statistics.
Because people need to understand what's happening.
They need to understand that they're being played, that they're being manipulated, that those who want to fundamentally change America realize that we are too powerful to be taken down militarily, but that we can be taken down from within.
And therefore, all the emphasis on dividing us on the basis of race, age, income, religion, political affiliation, gender, you name it, throw it in the pot, Divide the people up into all these identity groups and bingo!
You take down the great United States.
The Perilous Fight.
It is a perilous fight and this is my first chance to get the book.
I am very much looking forward to reading it.
You should all read it too.
The Perilous Fight by Dr. Ben Carson.
Dr. Carson, thank you so much for coming in.
It's been a great being with you.
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