Emotional truth, but because when you write it up there is the possibility of people responding. Unidentified friends who might read the work, even if across centuries, and join the conversation. For me, writing this book, i cannot think of i cannot think of a more important conversation to be having words too strange to be processed alone. And so, i want to say everyone who picked up the book, bad it, it decided to join the conversation. I want to thank the judges of the National Book foundation. I want to thank Peter Castano who First Published my work and has been it fettering writers come anything englander, who kicked my aspirin it definitely deserved kicking. To John Friedman have published my first story. Tom has been a mentor to me since before i joined the core. To the marines i served with in the committee of veteran writers, and especially those from the nyu veteran Writers Program central to this book and all the nonveteran writers equally essential to the book, pointing out what i didnt know i had. To my wife, jessica who offered tremendous love and support. To the rest of the crew at wmd and the folks at one, especially andrew walker, scott moyers, one of my early supporters in the publishing world. To my family. To my grandfather, my grandparents and aunt lou. And all of you here tonight. Thank you so much. [applause] electrifying. It is an electrifying speed. Redeployment. Thats amazing. Thank you for your service in your welcome for the National Book award. Congratulations and back to all the wonders and a hearty tip of the hat ensued a cocktail glass to other judges and i would just say to the final offense to anyone else out there associated with any book published this year, it does not take him a prize, i know its difficult not to think of yourself at least somewhat as losers, but remember, outside of the literary world, all of us are considered losers. [laughter] i have had a tremendous time this evening. Id like to thank harold arkin bomb in the National Book world for fighting me. Im so so happy over to buy all of your drink on the balcony. Summit media can buy a drink about the next time. The official party is after upstairs. The after party for me, geraldine and a bottle of wild turkey. That night, everybody. [applause] i was told that the wonders should go over there. The nurse should go over there. One nation what we can all do to save americas future. In it, the prominent former nurse search in a president ial critic proposes a vote out of what he calls u. S. Declined. He contends his solutions appeal to every americans decency and common sense. This program is about an hour. Host dr. Carson, welcome. The best for you to start before we delve into your book is to delve into you. Tell me you have a very inspirational story many ways. Tell me where you grew up. Guest i grew up in detroit and a couple of years in boston also. My mother came from a large rural family, got married when she was 13. Host from where . Guest rural tennessee. My father moved to detroit. He was a factory worker to seven years later discovered was the bigamist. Having a thirdgrade education and raise us on her own. We were particularly Good Students and that is putting it mildly. I was a dummy. Host a neurosurgeon now. Thats what i want to get through, how you got to neurosurgeon from dummy. Guest everybody is to call me names and tease me. My mother, any success i have i have to contribute to god and my mother. She is always speaking with them and came up with the idea of opening your eyes and looking around you. She knows that the home she claimed on the people didnt want you on tv. No offense. Theyve had a lot of books. She looked up where we we lived and worked up where they lived in somehow clicked her mind, if i get my voice to stop looking at tv all day long and start reading. She imposed on us. Host did you have a favorite tv show . Guest i loved anything. You didnt need the tv guide. I could tell you every station. She basically restricted us to two or three tv programs per week and with all their spare time we had to wait two bucks apiece for the Detroit Public Library and submit to her book report, which she couldnt read him up or we didnt know. Host did you find that your mom couldnt read . Guest later on in high school. In fact, she got her ged the same year i graduated from high school. Host no kidding. But anyway, by making us read, which i hated, something happened. I used to admire the smart kids in the class. They are the same age i am. But as i started for me, all of a sudden a teacher would ask a question and i need the answer and it got me excited. I got to the point where if i was even a book i went from being the dummy to the top of the class and a year and a half. Host was the first book you really sunk into . My dad made me read found encouragement in eighth grade and that is what that is the smart interest in politics. Guest in third grade and it was about a beaver. It will be a bright sky to save. I went on from there and read every book in the detroit library. And then i started reading about plants and rocks because you live near the Railroad Tracks and there were all these blocks and i could get boxes of rocks and identify them. Host youre a scientist and didnt realize it. Now im starting to make a connection here. That may be sparked your interest in science. Guest one day in Science Teacher held up a big lack shiny rock. And asked what it is. I boost my hand. Everybody turned on. They said this is going to be hilarious. Host . None of the jokester . Escovedo i couldnt possibly know the answer, i said is a subsidiary. They didnt know that they should be laughing or whether they should be impressed. The teacher said that his way. I explain how it was formed and they were too shocked. I was more shocked than anybody because it dawned at that moment that i was sent stupid. Host were great . Guest fifthgrade. The teacher started a rock collection with me, got me involved in animals. I said look into the microscope, discovering the whole world of protozoa. Mr. Jake. Host we all have one or two teachers that we took a little extra interest. You never forget their name. Guest that was more than 50 years ago. The interesting thing is i went back to that school and this was several years ago good morning america. And they wanted to trace my roots. Mr. Jake was still there. Balbina potbelly. And i wanted. To show them the animals because we have a squirrel, tarantula, crayfish, all of these things. He said we had to get rid of those things a long time ago. Host did you have a Good Relationship with your father . Guest not a strong relationship. We would see them periodically. Last time as the day i got married 39 years ago. Host disaffected family he has a relationship with those half brothers . That it all . Guest i kind of look at the big picture. You know, my mother tried to make up for all of that. My father, you know he was involved with drugs, alcohol, women. Theres nothing wrong with women, but you cant have more than one. I probably would not have been the best influence on me. So in retrospect, even though i was devastated as a kid, pray let him come back, now i realize i would not have the best thing for me. Host what would you be doing . Guest first of all, the same thing i would be doing. Bring back some fiscal responsibility, fiscal common sense. A lot of people blame the unions for what happened to detroit. But i actually dont pray in the unions. They would gladly say to me that day. Thats all they want. Host their members on a better deal. Guest free. But the executives, they have a oneyear, five year container, 15 year plan. They understand it and make it from seeping into the union that eventually the problem that they can anyway because they would have gone on before. It was someone elses host you mismatch the executives . Guest same thing i see around the country for cheap looking at these seminars. Guest you have got the spark of enthusiasm for resale. Have you supposed to come from conservatives . Did you assume you are a conservative when you did this . To get the shoehorned always conservative. Guest obviously, play close to people, growing up leaflet to troy, when i went to college i was radical. So where did you go to school . Guest i went to jail. El. There was a black panther rally, you know, server is evil and all this kind of stuff. It was just the way of a setback time during our history. Radicalism is very much expected i consider myself more of a logical person than i am a conservative or liberal or anything. Im not all that fond of labels. I save most of our problems are easily comparable if we just threw away the labels. I indicated in the book i would love a situation where Party Designation is not on the ballot. You have to actually know what the person was. Host a lot of cities a lot of cities burn mayor races, that is the case then its not surprising. Guess whos getting stuff done . Mayors. They dont have the baggage that comes with the Political Party right now. So you go tdl and when did you decide in going to be a doctor . Guest i had actually decided that when i was eight years old. I used to love machine stories in church. It seemed like the most noble on the face of the earth. Great personal sacrifice, bringing mental, physical and spiritual healing to people. I said that if im going to do. I turned 13 having grownup in dire poverty and decided to be rich. At that point i wanted to be a psychiatrist. Host you decide a psychiatrist is a better way to make money . Guest on television delivered big fancy mansions and a plush offices. Host were the psychiatrists are referring to . Desk or the tv programs. Guest i started reading psychology today. Everybody would bring me their problems. I would sit down. And i majored in psychology in college and have luminary professors and there was really pretty exciting. But when i got to medical school, i said everybody has special gifts and talents are yours . Asserted inking about my manifest i had a tremendous none of a tremendous modified and coordination. And the ability to think in three dimensions, which is essential for a narrow surgeon because you are dealing with a nebulous mass. Host were the triggers, which are even smaller. Guest you have to keep in mind what attracts art even though youve give to them. If you dont have threedimensional skills [inaudible] guest some of the jobs i had done and performed extremely well. Host did you do for steel factory . Guest reina theater. You know, youre driving these enormous poems of steel and drop them in the of the truck. Theyve let me do that after one day. I said these guys see something in me. The next guy. Tesco no, no. I was a summer job and a lot of people who worked there permanently didnt get to see that. But as i thought about it, but not a would be a tremendous nurse urging. A lot of people thought i would be strange because there had been a black neurosurgeons in the history of the world. To me, i didnt think about it you said this is a by talents are. This is learned in ago. Host i hear that basically her surgery to one rotation where people can identify that the surgeons are sometimes the Plastic Surgeon rotation because youve got to know there is an artistic at the same time. Now lamp it in some ways. Is there truth about for guest i think there would be as a lot of my career evolved without craniofacial surgery with plastic surgery. Host you are not practicing right now. The u. S. A. . Guest i miss the way it used to be. Host what does that mean . Guest there were a lot of things in the process changing. Most people when they chose medicine, they chose it because you had to figure out well, im going to solve this problem. In the days, in the early days cannot very be a kid from bolivia or some thing that this incredible problem and didnt have resources. I just said override it. Host you figure it out because he wanted to solve the problem. Guest nobody said to because the hospitals had a big enough for her chest and was okay. Once the Insurance Companies to dictate how much they were going to pay the hospitals no longer had a margin and you want to do for . Are you kidding me . Just changing so much in so much bureaucracy. So one of my goals in life is to try to make medicine fun again. I want doctors to get up in the morning and be excited about going to work. Host should talk or is he getting rich . Guest doctors should be well compensated, which is a different name. Host who should be aboard in our society . Teachers or doctors . Guest i would say it is an irrelevant question. I think people should be paid for what they do. Recognize that doctors spend a very long time training. They go to college. They go to medical school for four years. Internship, residency. Host you arguably say it is 12 years to simply do postgraduate work to be a practicing neurosurgeon. Guest takes a long time. And theres a lot of sacrifice involved. Once you do start working, you are working extraordinary hours and then youve got the short issue with the neurosurgeon is particularly bad because everybody thinks everything is supposed to be perfect and they are dealing with very high with real estate. You know, that was one of the reasons that i had a real problem of socalled Health Reform that doesnt include the reform. It can even be serious. Host the president would talk about it when push came to shove. Your christianity is that the book. Science and faith sometimes cola. You had this highly scientific mind and you are very deeply religious person. Some people would say that doesnt compute. That doesnt always give you. How does that compute with you . Guest first of all, i am not deeply religious, but i have a very strong relationship with god. There is a difference. The difference is that religion tends to be more form and faith has to be more subtle. In the name of religion, a lot of really silly stuff has been carried on. Host you see that in the middle east right now are any point in time. Guest exactly. You will have a deep relationship with god have a tendency to do things in a different way. Host now go to science. Guest i actually believe science and faith can be very quite compatible. Ive had some interesting discussion with Nobel Laureates who say, how can a person of your intelligence believe that god created heaven, earth, all this stuff. I say how could a person of your intelligence came from nothing. Explain to me how that works. We dont understand everything. So i would give you something. And you are going to tell me it explodes and we had a perfectly organized system to the point we can predict seven years when its coming. But go would have found, that just happy. And a farewell, if you have enough explosions over a long enough period of time, eventually one of them will be the perfect explanation about his vote will have. So if i blow a hurricane three junkyard over billions of years, billions of times, eventually there would be a pretty good form 740 sevens ready to fly. Is that that is what youre saying basically. I said no problem with that. Im not going to denigrate you because of that. But theres a lot more faith. Host if somebody asked you are your creationists who believe in evolution, you would answer . Guest i believe god created heaven and earth. And i find that much easier to believe because you have to recognize that you take somebody like charles star who as you probably know started out in the seminary. But he got to the point where it goes off to the Galapagos Islands to start scenes. He sees benches with the heavy peaks. You never see that anyplace else. As evidence of evolution. It depends on how you look at it. Years before he had come here, which she didnt know at the time, do you have survived were the ones who had beat savvy enough to break through this evening extract nutrition. So that i actually believe is happening is you have a creator has given his creatures the ability to adapt to the buyer may appear to the environment. So you dont have to start over every time. Host you believe in sort of some part of darwinism throughout the world. Guest i mean, i call it darwinism. But i believe an adaption. Creatures with the ability to adapt to an environment. If im the creator rather give my creatures that ability. Host 6000 or a billion . Guest the earthquakes i dont know the answer to that. The bible says in the beginning god created heaven and earth. Host i have some people say one day couldve been a billion years. People that have defended saying youve seen success in years. Guest i would say theres nothing that tells us how will be your face the bible. But also i believe that the reason god is god is because he can do stuff we cant do. So if you wanted to create some in the dirt he had aged neck, he could do that. Absolutely. That is why he would be god. Host and so coming your scientific education you feel like as not conflict . Guest i have never had any instance where my belief in god as conflicted my ability to be a good neurosurgeon. Host out with aldrin had a character, he was a search was a surgeon with a god complex. Supposedly a stereotype. Is that just an unfair hollywood view of most surgeons . Guest there is no question that there are some surgeons who have fairly large egos. In effect, it selects people like that. Those are not going to become surgeons. So it does select those kind of people. I know of a lot of incredibly caring, decent people. Host i get why they might have a god complex because theyre the only ones that can solve the problems in their head and that is where it comes from a little bit. Guest yeah, poster how does you prevent it . People could be feeding your ego. You are john hawkins. You were at the elite of the elite. How did you keep your head . Guest because i personally remember and still remember where i came from and i also recognized that a lot of things depend on a lot of other situations. There is a lot of important people involved in everything ive done. I tell everybody i was, you know, theres always other people involved. My mother, if she hadnt given to me, i wouldve ended up in the factories have been the first. Output was anything wrong with that seen this before. But it wouldnt have realized the potential for some of the very complex operations. Think about the first set of conjoined twins coming out, that kind of thing had never been done with them. But i had to consult with the cardio thoracic surgeon who were extremely good and understood the concept of endothermic incentive to figure out how we work that together and work with the Plastic Surgeons with how we ever going to get discovered . A lot of people besides myself and all those kinds of things. Host