Your other title is dr. Ben carson. Why did you decide to pursue a career in medicine . Hud sec. Carson as a youngster i used to hear the stories in church about missionary doctors. They seem to me like the most noble people on the face of the earth, going to all kinds of places at great personal risk, to bring mental, physical and spiritual healing to people. I said that is what i want to do. When i was eight years old i decided that was the path i was going to take. Obviously, it changed. I went from there to wanting to be a psychiatrist. When i got into medical school, i said, what are you really, really good at . I started examining my life and i realized they had hand i coordination and the ability to think in three dimensions. , never knocked things over which is good if you want to be a brain surgeon. That was the thing that led me in that direction. Neurosurgeon, but i quickly migrated towards the kent. I had this great affinity towards young people. Host clicking tell us about the study of the brain . Hud sec. Carson the human brain is incredible. It has billions of irans, hundreds of billions of it hasctions , hundreds ofeurons billions of interconnections that can process in a splitsecond split second. The cabal the people you know will have two eyes, a nose and mouth to ears. Is able to distinguish one from another. Thousands and thousands of people. At a splitsecond, it is an amazing oregon. A person with a normal brain is capable of doing almost anything. Your people say i am not good at math. No, you were just not taught math well. Everybody with normal brain can be very good at math. Host how many surgeries did you conduct over the years . Hud sec. Carson 15,000. Host was there one more successful than the other . Hud sec. Carson there was certainly some that garnered a lot of attention. To me it was not the amount of attention it garnered, it was the fact that you are actually intervening in somebodys life. You have an opportunity to give them a chance at normality. Cannot put a price tag on that. When i was running for president , it was one of the more wonderful things, that i got to see so many of my patients. Every state i went to people would be there. 10 place i went there with patients. I said, lets just have clinic after this. It was great to see how they were doing. The children had their own children now. Wing case in particular really grab me. But in thiseveral, place the family came up to me in kentucky and said, do you recognize this young man. I said he looked familiar. I say that about everybody. They said, you operated on him when he was yet when he was one years old. They said he just graduated number one in his class from college. Host you also separated conjoined twins, how did you do that . Set,ec. Carson the first they were joined at the back of the head, whether is a lot of blood fluids blood vessels. That is why no one separated them. We use the technique, hypothermic arrest where we cool the body until bought hard stops and pumped all the blood out and cut through those vessels, reconstruct them. We pump the blood back into the bottle into the body. They did have some brain damage because they develop bad infections because we cannot get everything covered. They survived for a long time. Americasstate of Health Care System today based on your own experience is what . Hud sec. Carson something that could be improved if we really stopped and thought about it. Was the purpose of help insurance in the beginning . It was to keep you from losing a farm if you got severely bill or injured. We have allowed it to grow and mushroom to the point where we , itk, if we have a hang now ought to be a hang nail it ought to be taking care of by by our insurance. We keep trying to patch it up, we will not get anywhere. We need to go back to the basics and say, what is the purpose . Patient that we put the and a Healthcare Provider in. He center we are smart people, we can craft something that actually works. I doubt we can get there because there are so many special Interest Groups involved in the system that we do have. It does not work for the people, but it works for the special interest. Host you are now on the inside, would you think of washington . Hud sec. Carson there is an attempt to change it. This is not a republican or democrat wing, this is an thatnched bureaucracy worked for various people. It is not what was intended by the founders of our nation. Any attempt to change it back to will be met with the most vehement resistance. Host what prepared you for this job . Hud sec. Carson a lot of things. I dont think god ever asks you to do anything youre not prepared for. As a child growing go up, seeing what happens to people who are insecure in their housing, even experiencing that for a while myself, until some relatives took a sin. Took us in. Recognizing the incredible hard work of my mother who could finally have her own place. The reassurance that that gave to me. Those are important things. Physician. Rking as a it is so hard to try to give children a Second Chance at life just to put them back into an environment. That bothered me tremendously. An opportunity to change that, but also having an opportunity to take the division of pediatric neurosurgery at john hopkins, which when i was a director was not even on the map. That took a lot of work. It to get a lot of coordinating. Sphere, in the business nationalin starting a nonprofit which became very successful. Things gave me a lot of organizational skills. How do you do things, had he managed groups of people. Had he actually get things done . Host let me read this headline from the New York Times. Dont make housing for the poor to cozy. Is that a fair headline . That is carson completely inaccurate. I am used to inaccurate headlines. We were at a transitional they wereit and telling me that they are generally able to give people in and out and into more permanent days,g in less than 30 which is more than three times faster than it is nationally. They said, with a data instead of concentrating on particulars, they concentrated on how to get people out there and selfsufficient. What they had was ok, but it was not plush. I said that makes a lot of sense. There was a New York Times reporter who said we can make some hay out of this. Think the press treats you fairly or unfairly . Hud sec. Carson they dont treat you fairly unless you subscribe to their agenda. Host 7 billion was the proposed budget cuts for this department. What impact that have on hud . Hud sec. Carson we are restructuring and very significantly. Getting rid of a lot of redundancies, regulations. Some of which meant well, but onn you stack one regulation top of another, you create a situation where, instead of going from point a and doing a straight line, it is for a hard to get there. All of that costs a lot of money. When you take those things out you begin to realize significant savings. When you begin to look at the tremendous need for Affordable Housing that we have, and you begin to have things like the rad program where we bring private money a mixing money, you mix it with the remedial work that needs to be done at the housing facilities and bring them up to speed. Program, we were licking at 14 in terms of private to public dollars. Now we are up to 119 and it will continue to get better. We are able to do tremendous things. Those kinds of things work. Having said that, by doing things in a much more efficient way, whatever money we have, whatever final budget we have, we will use that in a very efficient way. Host this department is now 52 years old. What do you think your mission is . What is the mission of hud . Hud sec. Carson the mission is to provide safe, affordable. Ousing it has to be quality housing for people. In addition to that, we want to build communities, complete communities. The need to have educational facilities there. You need to have mechanisms that allows people to become employable. You need to have food, you cannot have these food deserts. Grocery to incentivize stores to come in there. It has to be a safe environment. In other words, you have to have a complete and nurturing community. That is why we are restructuring things here because otherwise we continue down the same road that we have been on for decades and decades. Is peoplend up with who are quite complacent to be in the same Public Housing that their mother or grandmother was in. Aboutying anything bad their mother or grandmother, i understand that you have to say that now. What i am saying is that we want to create ladders of opportunity so that people can move up and. Ecapture the American Dream instead of thinking about what they can do, not what they cannot do and not what somebody else needs to do for them. Detroit andew up in in the 1950s and 1960s it was home to two mayan people. Now to 600,000. Detroit wasson once the most prosperous city in america, from there went to the biggest bankruptcy in america. What happened . Do not like to spend a lot of time criticizing people, but i whereay it became a place people became more and more upon others, upon the government to do things for them. Instead of creating opportunities, we just started handing things to people. We did not spend enough time thinking about the educational facilities and what kind of education we were giving the children. I am a shot believer that if you give a person a good education, they write their own ticket. It does not matter where you put them. When you dont do that you end up with situations that we have any lot of our cities. We have the pay much more attention to that in the future because we are in a nation that only has 330 million people. That sounds like a lot of people. That is one quarter of what china has and one quarter of india. We have to compete with them in the future, which means we have to get things for the buck. We have to develop our people and get serious. We cannot be using them as ponds and a political game. Host what is the role of washington in state and local governments . Hud sec. Carson they have to work together. Pray much as you have seen what coordinated efforts with Hurricane Harvey and irma. We have to have the same kind of seriousness when we think about for our children and the development of our people. We have a lot of people who could intentionally be developed. I look at the fact that we have 5 of the nations of the worlds population, but 25 of the inmates. Think about all that lost potential. A lot of those people who end up in the penal system, the group in a horrible environment. Probably with no Authority Figure in their lives. Either case it does not work out. Situation and the we need to spend time thinking that were the things can do to educate those people . Education with low and little skills and come out with low education and little skills. Ets give them some skills lets give them some education. Lets give them options. Let them start working while they are in prison and Start Building a resume. What kind of person are they, so that they become attractive to employers coming out. These are things that could help us tremendously. There are that a lot of people in jail who are very smart, they just have not have the right kinds of opportunities. Those are the things we need to think about. We need to think about the fact that, particularly an hour in cities, weur inner have so many young gross acre pregnant. After the first baby their education usually stops. We want to give them an opportunity to give them their masters degree and learn to be selfsufficient and teach that to their children to break the cycle of poverty. One of the things that we are doing is the envisions center. There is a first my bible that says you want to give people a vision. There are kids who only have five answers of what they want to do when they grow up. There is the mentorship program. Studies show that low opportunity children who are mentored have a much higher Graduation Rate from high school. There was a wellpublicized study by the Bookings Institute that said that there were three things that could be done that would limit a persons likelihood of living in poverty to 2 or less. Three things. Number one, graduate from high school. Never too, get married. Number three, wait to have children. Those are the kind of things you begin to apply to your policies and your programs. Host and many are from broken homes. Hud sec. Carson yes many are from broken homes. Host would you remember when your parents separated . Hud sec. Carson i was devastated and i was constantly praying for them to get back together. Days, it was not nearly as common as it is now. Did not work out, they never did get back together, but my mother was a very special person. She absolutely refused to be a victim and came from an enormous family in tennessee. She got married at age 13. Years later she discovered her husband was a bigamist. She absolutely refused to be a victim and she would not let us be the dems. Because us read books she worked as a domestic and she noticed these people who live in beautiful fancy houses with read books and plan and strategize. World, we todays probably wouldve called social services and it wouldve carted her away for child abuse. But in those days we had to do it. He made all the difference in the world. More importantly, developed the different vision vision of who i was an of the world and what you had to do. Experience that steve harvey had. We both had this idea and we started talking about it. He had been pushing the idea of visions, then calling them in center so envisions people do not think they were getting glasses. Its the same thing when we had extended families who took real interest and have the ability to nurture children and get them to where they need to be. Have of children do not those things that means you sure that we have them because they are human capital. If we develop them correctly, they become part of the engine and not part of the load. He wrote thatbook you had a violent temper as a child. Can you explain . I think it was because i was thinking about me. It was always about me. My thing, they were in myspace, my. Was 14 andn i another teenager injured me and i try to stab him with a camping knife. The knife played struck with such force on his belt buckle that approach. He was terrified, but i was more terrified because i was trying to take somebodys life over nothing. The had a profound affect on me. I locked myself in the bathroom and i started thinking about my life. I turn things around academically. I will let that would never become a temper like that. My options would be chill, Reform School or the grave. I just said, lord, help me. There was a bible and there were all these verses about anger. Getting in a dream out out of trouble because he will get right back in it. 13 32. O for three hours i stayed in their praying and contemplating and reading and just came to the understanding that to react violently was not a sign of strength, it was a sign of weakness. You could easily be manipulated by your environment and by people in your environment. I just said i would not been manipulated. That was the end of the temper. Question, he did not have a temper, until they found the article in which my mother did an extensive interview. Did you hit your mother with a hammer . Hud sec. Carson i tried to. My brother caught it from behind. But that just goes to show you how out of control i was. Go to medical school, and up at johns hopkins, then you give a speech at the National Prayer breakfast in 2013. How did that come about . Hud sec. Carson when they asked me to be the keynote speaker i said it was a mistake. I had done in 1997, and i was not aware of anyone but did it twice. Then i found out that one person did it twice, billy graham. I said that is good company. I said lord, what do you want me to say . I did not know what i was supposed to say, but i knew i was supposed to say something. They were nervous because they said we want to see your speech. I said i dont have it. I did not know what i would say until the morning of the speech. It was what was on my heart, and it was what came to me. I was so frightened by what was happening to our country with political correctness, and with a Government Programs and them in imposing themselves on the people. And being a student of history, i just recently wrote a book with my wife called america the beautiful. Recognizing with the idea was him where we were going, and how foreign that was to the initial thoughts about what this country was. I spoke about that and some people said, that was offensive. I said it will only be offensive if it applies to you. I never expected it to have the impact that it did. The next thing i knew, people were saying you should run for president. I said, dont be ridiculous. If you justg, ignore it it will go away, but it did not go away. I did a lot of public speaking. By that time i had all these petitions, i can barely get a my office. I thought maybe i should listen. That is really how it impacted my life. You learn about yourself while running for president . I found of that america is full of very good people all over. People with a lot of common sense. I have learned that i have enjoyed interact with those people. Was in amazing experience as i rose to the ranks, even reaching front runner status and having reporters from all over the world following you every place you went. The thing that really impacted me the most was the feeling that we have to get away from all of this horrible divisiveness that is destroying our nation. House divided against itself cannot stand. It never will stand, it never has. As much as much of a danger to our country is any Nuclear Weapon from an enemy. Many people blame the president for some of that divisiveness. Will havearson you people blaming everybody. We all need to take a step back and say, can we work together. Work together . Can we reach across the aisle . Does it have to seem weirder strange because you want to talk some talk to someone from the other side . This is another thing i have learned by talking to lots of people. We are not that different, democrats, republicans, independents. Not nine out of 10 things we are aligned. Yet we allow certain people, certain elements to stir us up. In the third were grade and everybody is having a good time playing, then the guy says, did you hear what he said about yo mama . Are in. The situation we we have to stop listing to that person and sit down in comparison and intelligent fashion. I am convinced we can solve our problem. Host what was your interaction michael the president. Sec. Carson we interaction like with the president . On the. Carson we are same page. Personality wise we are very different. Host do you want to elaborate. Hud sec. Carson he has a much more forceful personality. Gentle. O be relatively i think that forceful personality is probably something that is needed in the setting we are in right now. The direction we having going in we having going in for 50 years it is not necessarily a good direction, it requires a strong personality to turn the boat around. Host how did you meet your wife . Hud sec. Carson we were both from detroit but we had to go to new haven to yell yale to meet each other. We were both for. Recruiting in the detroit public high schools in the detroit public high schools and some of this suburban schools and we discovered that we kind of liked each other. And wenothing formal drove back. I fell asleep at the wheel going on the highway at 90 miles per hour. I was awakened by the vibration of the cars going off. I grabbed the wheel and turned it, we started spinning. The savior life passes before your eyes, it did. The nexttopped in lane. We pulled off as 18 wheeler was coming through. We were both wideawake at that point. We set the lord spared our lives for a reason and that is when we started going together. Host how many grandkids . We have threen cents a all got married in 2011 and we have three grandchildren so far. Host what is that like for you . Hud sec. Carson it is wonderful. They say grandchildren are the price you get for not killing your children. Wives server a successful on the grandchildren are well and they are healthy. Curvewhat is the learning for you here at this department . Hud sec. Carson it has had to go much faster than usual dill do not have a deputy secretary. Most of the assistant secretary positions have not been filled. We are hoping that because of these two disasters that have occurred, harvey and irma, that they will put pressure on irma to vote on these cases. They have hardly been to the confirmation process months ago. Foolishness is holding them up, but we have to look at what is happening to our country. We need a full force to take care this adequately. Any desire to run for elected office down the road . Hud sec. Carson i have no desire. I want to do this job well and i want to make sure that we do the things that provide a sick if it amount ofease in want tole housing i make sure that we ensure Housing Finance so that the American Dream stays alive. To tampo do what i can down the hatred going on in this country and help people to realize that we are in the same boat and lets not be so easily manipulated by those i have a different motive. Host is there one act about ben carson that may surprise people . Probably theon fact that i love to play pool. I love to play with my best friend, who is my wife. She did not know how to play pool before we got married. She said, i want to spend quality time with you so i best i guess i better learn how to play. Host how do you play . Hud sec. Carson concentration. I am always saying, do not miss easy shots. Host we thank you for your time. Dr. Carson my pleasure. Thanks on cspan, personal accounts of Sexual Harassment and abuse, from fox news anchor Gretchen Carlson, and the me too movement founder, tarana burke. That is followed by the former u. S. Ambassador samantha power. And you can Parliament Debates lgbt writes rights. Recallsnaut scott kelly space in his book, endurance. He is interviewed by a former nasa administrator. Yours was the Third Service mission. Having been a part of that mission and an official hubble hugger, what do you believe the legacy of hubble is . Is incredible. You would know better than i 27 years. Doing that kind of science on a daily basis, letting not only the scientists experience the data they get from it, which is most of the stuff you do not see, but also, the public that is provided and lets people get a sense for where we are in the universe, which is pretty insignificant, when you consider those images. It has been a great success. It was a great First Mission for me. Afterward, sunday night at 9 00 eastern on booktv on cspan2. Monday night on the communicators, National Association of broadcasters ceo gordon smith on the future of television. View, isture, in my very bright for broadcasting because of this new 3. 0 receiver standard. Dramaticallyng into the efficiency of our spectrum. So ifl wake up your phone there is an emergency coming into your neighborhood, you can be alerted to that through a broadcast signal. Said, tremendous pictures, the sound capabilities it will give and augment. The broadcastet, signal is a oneway signal, one way to everyone in that geographic area. Because itll be in the future theynet interoperable, if want, it will come back through a broadcast signal. And there will be the opportunity to have far more engagement with your television broadcaster. In the political world, i wish this existed when i was there. Provideallow them to advertising for members of congress, to the people in the districts they represent. Watch the communicators monday night at 8 00 eastern on cspan two. Cspan2. Earlier this year, former fox news host Gretchen Carlson sat down with sally quinn for discussion of Sexual Harassment and abuse. The conversation took place shortly after the New York Times published a story detailing decades of abuses from harvey weinstein. Ms