Ask Dr. Drew - Dr. Ben Carson – Neurosurgeon & 17th Secretary of U.S. Dept. of HUD - Ask Dr. Drew - Episode 36

Episode Date: April 7, 2021

Dr. Ben Carson once stabbed a man, who only survived because the knife hit a metal belt buckle. "He was terrified, but I was more horrified than he was, because I realized that I was trying to kill somebody over nothing." says Dr. Carson. "I started contemplating my life... The only place I was going was jail, reform school, or the grave. And I didn't want that to happen." Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Kaleb Nation ( https://kalebnation.com) and Susan Pinsky (https://twitter.com/FirstLadyOfLove). Dr. Ben Carson has received dozens of awards for his work as a neurosurgeon and hospital director at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Spingarn Medal. He is the author of 9 books and served as the 17th Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Dr. Carson is the founder of the new think tank The American Cornerstone Institute: https://AmericanCornerstone.org  Follow Dr. Carson: https://twitter.com/realbencarson  THE SHOW: For over 30 years, Dr. Drew Pinsky has taken calls from all corners of the globe, answering thousands of questions from teens and young adults. To millions, he is a beacon of truth, integrity, fairness, and common sense. Now, after decades of hosting Loveline and multiple hit TV shows – including Celebrity Rehab, Teen Mom OG, Lifechangers, and more – Dr. Drew is opening his phone lines to the world by streaming LIVE from his home studio in California. On Ask Dr. Drew, no question is too extreme or embarrassing because the Dr. has heard it all. Don’t hold in your deepest, darkest questions any longer. Ask Dr. Drew and get real answers today. This show is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. All information exchanged during participation in this program, including interactions with DrDrew.com and any affiliated websites, are intended for educational and/or entertainment purposes only. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with the sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM. A sportsbook

worth a slam dunk. An authorized gaming partner of the NBA. BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you,

please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the program. I'm watching you all on the restream here, but in just a few moments, I'm going to get to a very special guest. We are really fortunate to have him today. He is the, well, he was the 17th Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Dr. Ben Carson is the founder of a new think tank, the American Cornerstone Institute, where he is the founder and chairman of, again, the American Cornerstone Institute. You can find out more at AmericanCornerstone.org.

And, of course, Dr. Carson was in the news during the presidential campaigns and also as a secretary in the last administration. But I want to shine a light on something I'm not sure if you understand. He was a neurosurgeon who has received dozens of awards, was hospital director at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center. Some of his awards have included things such as the Presidential Medal of Honor. You can follow Dr. Carson at Real Ben Carson at R-E-A-L Ben Carson, C-R-S-O-N. Let's go ahead and bring on the one and only Dr. Ben Carson. This pandemic began, we were not sure how it spread.

Everyone began wearing masks and using hand sanitizers. Great ways to slow the spread, but a lot of people still get sick. I can personally attest to that. We now know that COVID-19 spreads via aerosols and droplets from the nose and mouth. And I've been thinking about this for a while. Why aren't we also sanitizing the nose and mouth,

killing the virus directly at the place where it spreads? Why weren't more doctors thinking about this? Well, some doctors have done the research, which I discovered it sooner. That's why I'm excited to tell you about Halodyne. It's an FDA-registered antiseptic for the nose and mouth that's proven to eliminate 99.99% of the virus that causes COVID-19 in just 15 seconds. That's right. It's created by a team of clinicians with decades of experience in antiviral treatments, initially created to protect healthcare workers.

These are smart scientists, and it's a great product that also eliminates many other viruses and infecting particles. I'm using both their nasal antiseptic swab and their oral spray

to help protect those around me, and you should be too. For others and for yourself, whether you're hopping on a three-hour flight, always use it there. Visiting grandparents or attending a meeting that you can't miss,

Halodyne's family of oral and nasal antiseptics give you the safe, easy, on-the-go antiviral protection for up to four hours. I encourage you to try Halodyne at halodyne.com today. My listeners get 10% off with the discount code DRDREW. That is H-A-L-O-D-I-N-E.com, discount code D-R-D-R-E-W.n-e dot com discount code d-r-d-r-e-w so obvious it just makes sense stop the virus before it spreads and gets in your body with halidine well i too have

struggled with gi issues over the years i have something called lynch syndrome so gut health is extremely important to me and while gut health awareness has increased it's led to a wellness trend that's inspired a host of questionable marketing and some false claims. Now, you've seen the word probiotic attached to all kinds of supplements, drinks, even more. They may claim to deliver the healthy microorganisms our gut needs for proper function, but all too often the promises are in fact too good to be true. Thankfully, I became aware of a company called Seed and their flagship product, the Daily Symbiotic. Seed's Daily Symbiotic offers 24 clinically researched strains of microorganisms in a single dose.

These strains support gut health and can improve regularity and relieve bloating, sometimes within as little as 24 to 48 hours. To me, what really sets Seed's Daily Symbiotic apart is the delivery system. While some products may offer the right strains, they're fragile, they rarely survive the trip through the gut, doesn't get where it needs to go, but Seed uses a capsule-in-capsule design that helps ensure the probiotic reaches your colon, which is where they often are needed.

I've been taking Seeds Daily Symbiotic, and I really encourage you to check out their story and the science behind what they do. To try it for yourself, just go to Seed.com slash Dr. Drew. Use code DrDrew20 for 15% off your first month of Daily Symbiotic. That is S-E-E-D.com slash DrDrew. Use code DrDrew20. Our laws as it pertains to substances are draconian and bizarre.

Psychopaths start this way. He was an alcoholic because of social media and pornography, PTSD, love addiction, fentanyl and heroin. Ridiculous. I'm a doctor for. Where the hell do you think I learned that? I'm just saying, you go to treatment before you kill people. I am a clinician. I observe things about these chemicals. Let's just deal with what's real.

We used to get these calls on Loveline all the time, educate adolescents and to prevent and to treat. If you have trouble, you can't stop and you want to help stop it, I can help. I got a lot to say. I got a lot more to say. Dr. Carson, welcome to the program. Very good to be with you again. It's good to see you. It's always a pleasure to be around you. You inspire me, I must tell you. And I want to tell a quick little story here. I don't, I want to, again, I want to emphasize this. To obtain a neurosurgical residency is a big deal.

To survive a neurosurgical residency and practice neurosurgery is a big deal. But to go and start running departments and then to further refine it into pediatrics is a big deal. And it's a big deal then to get administrative positions in the hospital and leadership roles amongst your neurosurgeon colleagues. I don't think people understand what that means. So I just want to hang a little lantern on that and say, trust me, that's a big deal. But I'm not going to let you respond to that yet, because what I actually want to talk about is I was present with you probably a year into your tenure at HUD. And you guys had that opioid symposium where all the secretaries came out

and talked about what they were going to do to turn the prescription opioid pandemic around. And I don't know if you remember what your comments were, but I almost fell out of my chair because I knew what they meant. You said essentially the following, man, I thought being a neurosurgeon was hard and rang a neurosurgical department.

This HUD thing, this is really hard. And I thought, oh my God, that is saying a lot. So I'll let you fill in the story from there. Well, what you understand when you're a neurosurgeon, you go into that operating room and you have complete control. And the patient's life depends on what you do. In a bureaucratic government position, there's a gazillion different little handles that have to be dealt with. And people love to discuss things to death. That must drive you crazy. That must have driven you nuts. Because as a surgeon, you want to get stuff done, right?

Right. You just want to boom, boom. What's the problem? Let's deal with it. Yeah, yeah. But it takes a while, but we're making some very good progress. You may remember some of the visits that I made to Los Angeles, and we were actually making progress with Mayor Garcetti and with others,

getting them to really understand that it's not just a matter of putting people in a shelter. I mean, that's fine, housing first. That's fine, getting people off the street. But you can't stop there. You have to go on to housing second and housing third, diagnose the reason they're on the street, and actually fix it if you truly want to be compassionate and you want to improve the quality of their lives.

And that's something that i think you fully understand more than almost anyone else yeah i be it's because you know i worked in a psychiatric hospital here in pasadena it's a freestanding psych hospital been here since the 1890s and it was when i arrived there i was actually moonlighting there as an internal medicine resident i was sort of managing a lot of the medical needs of psychiatric patients, which are profound. I can't emphasize that enough. And it was like a museum. It was like a museum of psychiatry. I actually didn't realize quite what I was seeing until I read, I'm forgetting the psychiatrist's name. He was the head of the APA for a long time. Lieberman, Dr. Lieberman, his book called Shrink. And boy, I saw all that in real time as

the tail end of what he was writing about, but I actually got to live it. Be that as it may, I got very good at treating patients with serious mental illness and addiction. And I'm very familiar with these conditions that you see on the streets and that knowing that four of them are dying every day in LA County, it's, it's, it's something that if you know how to help it, you can't live with it. It's like, I can't live with that because I, but the laws in California prevent us from really doing anything. Well, a lot of people don't realize that the majority of those people on the street have either mental illness, drug addiction, or both. And if you don't deal with those things, you're not going to make any progress, quite frankly.

A lot of times the mental illness that they have prevents them from having any insight into their condition. And therefore, you really need professionals who can meet them where they are and know how to treat such conditions if you really want to be compassionate. So I want to dig into that a little bit because I don't think I've been communicating that effectively enough. You've said it exactly spot on. I have co-opted the term anosognosia, which as a neurosurgeon, you may take exception to it. For those of you out there, anosognosia classically was a description of people who had, with right dominant brains, who had a right middle cerebral artery infarct, knocked out the left side of their body, would literally have no insight to that having happened. They would actually lose the left side,

awareness of left side of body and left side of world. So left just doesn't exist for them. And the term anosognosia, I believe, I know for a fact, was coined by Dr. Babinski, interestingly, turn of the century, turn of the 20th century. Do you take issue with me adopting that? I, because let me tell you something. When, when I started seeing some of the levels of denial I was dealing with in the, on the addiction front, I kept telling my staff, I kept going, God, it feels organic. This is not psychological. This is like, they can't see it. And so I have

adopted the term antisognosia to talk about that lack of insight. Am I overstepping my privilege there? I don't think so because if you go out and you interact with a lot of these people, they really do not recognize that they have a problem. And that's why particularly a lot of the people with psychiatric illnesses, they won't take their medication. And it's the very reason that putting them in an apartment, it's a nice thing to do. It makes us feel good. But in the long run, it's not doing them a whole lot of good.

And we started this way back even before Ronald Reagan, when we had these psychiatric institutions that maybe didn't treat people exactly the way they should be treated. And then, you know, they went to the clinics and then those didn't work. And then they just said, just forget about the whole thing. And there they were out on the street. Right. Or the prisons. Or the prisons. That's the other place they go. Or the prisons. It's like taking a child, quite frankly, and putting them on the street and saying, you're on your own. Because a lot of them, you know, act very much that way. They haven't progressed in their mental capabilities a long way.

And yet we expect them to be able to live out there on the street. It's just cruel as far as I'm concerned. Yeah, I completely agree with you. Are you working on this at the Cornerstone Institute? Among other things, homelessness continues to be one of our big issues. And I find that perhaps the best way to work on these things is with our roundtables, which we'll be doing in different parts of the country, bringing people from both sides of the aisle to the table and

putting the facts in the middle of the table and saying, let's work on this based on the facts, not based on your ideology or your political persuasion, but based on the facts. And that's the way to make progress. And we're having a hard time with that in America right now. You know, we get into our respective corners and we hurl hand grenades at each other. We don't seem to be able to talk to each other. We certainly can't ever pay each other a compliment or say that something that the other side did was good. You know, it's really quite infantile. Well, I heard you speak at the symposium, this one of the times you were out here in Los Angeles,

that former Governor Schwarzenegger put together. And you had a very poetic way of describing, I thought, a way to sort of melt some of that hostility about the right and left wings of a bird. Give us that again. I thought that was rather beautiful. Well, I said, you know, the symbol of our nation is the bald eagle and how majestically they fly in the skies.

But the reason they can do that is because they have a right wing and a left wing. If they had two left wings, they would crash. If they had two right wings, they would crash. But when they work together, it makes for a beautiful sight yeah i and that's exactly exactly true of our nation we have diverse opinions there was a time when people could live across the street from each other for 20 years they'd be friendly now if they live across the street and they have a different yard sign than you do they're the enemy yeah i you know i always enjoy differences you know what i mean i i i it's

i guess you know i try to explain to people a lot of the you know the sort of public discourse around science has been sort of weirdly distorted too and i kept saying no no in science we always get things wrong. And that's what we've discoursed with each other. And we can be very rough and very heated. And that's how we approximate the truth. That's how we learn. That's how we change.

And somehow, even in medicine, that's been knocked aside in some extent. But you can't learn anything from a bunch of yes men. If they all agree with you all the time, you're not going anywhere. Believe me, you're not going to think through your positions. You're not going to improve on your position. Right. And so I always thought it was something of a pleasure to have disagreements. Now it's something that people

can't tolerate or it means, I don't know, it says something about your character on either side and both sides, you know, hurl. Well, it feels like to me like we've developed sort of a, I don't know why, maybe it was COVID or something. I don't know. But we've developed sort of a hysteric kind of position, like we're all hysterical. And I've said before, if you came to me four years ago and started talking about Nazis and Hitler, I would go, maybe we got to get in the hospital for a minute. And now people just throw that stuff around like as though that's just axiomatic.

And it is very disturbing. But when you look at some of the societies that have preceded us, you know, down through history, before the destruction, you see a lot of what's going on in our society today. And, you know, America is more of an idea than it is a place, an ideal about freedom, about liberty, about justice for people. And when we get to a point where instead of love your neighbor, we're saying cancel your neighbor, you know, we've got a real problem. And we can't be destroyed by Russia or China or Iran or anyplace else, but we can be destroyed by ourselves.

A house divided against itself cannot stand. And, you know, when it comes to the homeless, we all should have compassion in our heart. We all should be thinking about what can we do together? What are the things that we have learned that can improve the lives of these people? It actually will cost us less money if we get people functional, particularly a lot of schizophrenics like that. If they take their medications and they have appropriate counseling, a large number of them, if you intervene appropriately, can become quite functional individuals. Yes. And the thing that's breaking my heart, and again, what makes me sort of exercised about this whole thing, is if you leave even a moderate schizophrenic untreated long enough,

they have brain damage. They don't come back. While if you get them early, they can really be restored to almost full functioning in most cases. Yeah. Well, you know, psychiatry was my original love. I did not know that. I had no idea about that.

That's interesting. I was a psychology major in college, did advanced psych and medical school. Oh, how interesting. Going home. Oh, for goodness sake. I changed from the intangible to the tangible aspects of the brain. You know, I had two really fine psychiatrists I worked with that did exactly the opposite. They started neurosurgery and flipped over to psychiatry.

But those two ended up having, you know, that they had a few years of neurosurgical training and neurology training and that I could rely on them for stuff that I couldn't rely on for some of the general psychiatrists. Like, I'll just tell you a quick story. I had a guy came in with vegetative features. And he was actually a friend of a friend kind of thing. So I knew how much he had changed. And it troubled me. Something wasn't right. He had literally been hospitalized a couple of times for depression. And there was vague suicidality.

But there was mostly sort of a belle indifference so he's sort of indifference to his condition but there was tremendous slowing and veg i mean tremendous vegetative symptoms without affect symptoms and i kept going i kept something's right something's wrong and uh this one of these psychiatrists who had been a neurosurgeon said to me goes that is a frontal lobe tumor. That is not a psychiatric problem. The insurance company would not get him an MRI at any point in these multiple hospitalizations. I demanded it. Somehow I got it.

I think the family, I told the family just plan to pay for it and then we'll attack the insurance company later because I don't remember if I saw some papilledema or something made me very confident that we had something here. And I think I did. I think I saw some papilledema or something made me very confident that we had something here. And I think I did. I think I saw some mild papilledema.

It was a huge frontal lobe tumor. He'd had a ENT procedure that he was supposed to follow up on to see if there was any remnant tumor. It was like a local benign nasopharyngeal tumor that went right up, went right up. Isn't that crazy? Well, let me tell you a strange insurance company tale. nasopharyngeal tumor that went right up. Isn't that crazy? Let me tell you a strange insurance company tale.

There was a child who needed a hemispherectomy. And this is when we were first really bringing, reviving that operation. And the insurance company hemmed and hawed and finally said, okay, we will approve it this time. But if the patient needs another one, we're not going to approve it. So what Dr. Carson is saying is he pioneered a procedure where they took off half the brain to control intractable seizures. And the insurance company would say, okay, you can take that half, but you can't take the other half, which is bizarre.

Which is bizarre. But that's the kind of garbage I would get. Listen, I have so many stories on the insurance front. I mean, I wish we could get the sort of the locus of control in medicine back to the patient-doctor situation. Absolutely. Can we talk about COVID for just a minute? I just want to talk about our peers.

I don't get to talk about this very often in the public context, but I had a very interesting experience with COVID this year where I was trained as an internist to really think things through, not worry about what the FDA is thinking, just worry about my understanding of the literature and my judgment based on my experience and the assessment of a given situation for a given patient. That's what I was trained in. And a certain amount of that required, you know, sort of skilled improvisation. I mean, I think that's what we're trained to do, to do really careful, well thought out, with justification for why we do what we did, with backup planning in case we're wrong. I felt like my peers, the general medicine group

froze during COVID. It was really interesting. All my surgical friends were like, what can we do here? What can we do? We got to do something. Let's improvise. Let's try this, try that. And medicine just froze in its tracks. I've never seen anything like it. It was, I kept saying, well, don't, you don't need doctors and have the nurse practitioners do it. Just follow a clinical pathway. Don't even worry about it. And we barely got into politics, but isn't that weird? Could you imagine that that got infected our peers? Isn't that crazy? It is crazy. But doctors are subject to peer pressure just as much as anybody else is. And what you should say and what you shouldn't say.

And even now, the incidence seems to be creeping up again, but the severity seems to be less. Far fewer hospitalizations, far fewer mortality. That part isn't being told. Only the part is being told that we seem to be having another spike. You know, we just need to be honest about it and throw the politics out and use the knowledge that we've accumulated. You know, I feel, you know, very strongly about this because, you know, I had a severe case of COVID. Yourself?

You did? Yeah. Yeah. I had a pretty bad one myself. It was good times. I had to get, you know, the antibody infusion. I did too. I did too.

Yeah. And that, I don't know if you had the experience I had, but when I had it, I actually felt improved during the infusion. It was weird. Colors actually got brighter. I was told my infusion artist, look, I just want to report this. He goes, yeah, I hear

that all day, all day long. They feel immediately better, which is crazy. We should use the monoclonal antibody therapy more effectively. Well, please go do what I did then, Dr. Carson. Get out on Instagram, do an Instagram live, and start educating. I did that while I was sick.

I kept saying, you've got to tell your doctor, make a judgment about decadron, but you should be getting the bamlet of amab now with etesivamir on top of it. Ordered right away if you meet criteria, because you've got to get in that lineup and get that infusion done. The sooner the better. And what I got from the public was, oh, you get special treatment. No, no. The government had purchased 800,000 doses, and it's sitting on the shelf waiting for you. Exactly. And then when I had, I got lots of feedback from people saying they talked to their physicians and the physicians really said, I don't know anything about that. I don't want to do that.

And that was a problem. Yeah. But, you know, a lot more have learned about it and the ability to treat even the serious cases has improved dramatically. So this is not to say that people shouldn't be careful but uh we should also take a victory lap there absolutely and and i don't know if you're keeping up on that new merc product but man when i they had a they had a phase one and phase two that was stunning but they too were like uh we can't really say anything we may be good maybe i thought i i you this this rhetoric is so um halting the rhetoric was very halting i thought no no no you can say this looks amazing now we got to go do a phase three

and see if indeed it is amazing which i suspect it's going to be i had a uber driver today who was from ghana and uh we were talking about covet and in all of those western coastal countries you have to take anti-malarials right and including including one of the very famous ones in this country yes and their incidence of COVID is 94 percent less than ours yes why why don't why don't we uh look at that kind of data? What? Oh, how dare you? Cancel. Cancel. Dr. Carson's canceled. You ready to cancel him? Cancel. He's canceled. Sorry, I can't talk to you anymore. And by the way, there's a 50-50 chance that YouTube could cancel us just for bringing this up. I got put in a YouTube jail for saying

after my COVID, I've been getting some very fancy immune profiles done every three weeks and I'm one of these people that have stayed up. 30% of people are staying up with their antibodies. I have 10 times, twice essentially vaccine level and it's just holding. I said that

and that violated YouTube's policy you can't say anything about immunity. Oh my goodness. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Well, you know, it's interesting because a lot of people think that freedom of speech, freedom of expression is something that can only be suppressed by the government and that's what makes it evil. But the fact of the matter is if it's done by the private sector, it's done by big tech, it's done by the media. With the compliance of the government, the effects are just as devastating. And we need to open our eyes and understand what's going on in our country.

I'm a big fan of Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote Democracy in America in the 1820s. And he observed this. He said, look, you have the most privileged speech in law and the least privileged speech in practice. And he called it the phenomenon of the town square, that you get yelled down in the town square, and you're not allowed to propose anything really interesting. Now you're not allowed to do anything because you get completely squashed by the town square. Let me ask you this. Did being in an administration, really being in Washington, in the White House, maybe you don't feel comfortable talking about this, but I'm curious. Did it surprise you and did it enhance your sense of hope for this country? Well, one of the things I said about HUD, we had the ugliest building, but the best people.

There are a lot of people who've been there for many, many years who are very wise and who contributed substantially to a lot of the things that we were able to accomplish. So when people say all government workers are lazy and bad, I don't believe that. Well, first, that's good right there. That's good, right? That's great news. That's a very good thing. But the bureaucracy is oppressive. The amount of time that it takes to do logical things, except in one other case.

Now, there was a group of young people who came to us who aged out of foster care. And they were telling us about the horrors of that. 20,000 age out of foster care every year. A quarter of them end up homeless. So we and our staff was able to put together the program. Foster used the independence. Within four months, the first grants were given out. Not only a place for them to stay, but the wraparound services to put them on a trajectory

of success. And speaking of wraparound services, isn't that what we need when we are dealing with the homeless people, particularly ability not only to give them a place to live, but those wraparound services that make the difference. I bristle a little bit with the wraparound service, what should we call it, nomenclature or aphorism. And let me tell you why. Can you still hear me okay? We lost Dr. Carson for a second. They're working on getting him back.

He's on his way. If you want to go to a quick ad break. All right, let's do that. Let's go to a break while we're trying to get Dr. Carson. I'll keep watching your guys' comments on the restream. And we will see you guys in just a second. This pandemic began, we were not sure how it spread. Everyone began wearing masks and using hand sanitizers.

Great ways to slow the spread, but a lot of people still get sick. I can personally attest to that. We now know that COVID-19 spreads via aerosols and droplets from the nose and mouth, and I've been thinking about this for a while. Why aren't we also sanitizing the nose and mouth, killing the virus directly at the place where it spreads? Why weren't more doctors thinking about this? Well, some doctors have done the research, which I discovered it sooner. That's why I'm excited to tell you about Halodyne. It's an FDA-registered antiseptic for the nose and mouth that's proven to eliminate 99.99% of the virus that causes COVID-19 in just 15 seconds. That's right. It's created by a team of clinicians with decades of experience in antiviral treatments, initially created to protect healthcare workers. These are smart scientists,

and it's a great product that also eliminates many other viruses and infecting particles. I'm using both their nasal antiseptic swab and their oral spray to help protect those around me and you should be too.

For others and for yourself, whether you're hopping on a three-hour flight, always use it there. Visiting grandparents or attending a meeting that you can't miss, Halodyne's family

of oral and nasal antiseptics give you the safe, easy, on-the-go antiviral protection for up to four hours. I encourage't miss. Halodyne's family of oral and nasal antiseptics give you the safe, easy, on-the-go antiviral protection for up to four hours. I encourage you to try Halodyne at halodyne.com today. My listeners get 10% off with the discount code DRDREW. That is H-A-L-O-D-I-N-E.com, discount code D-R-D-R-E-W. So obvious, it just makes sense.

Stop the virus before it spreads and gets in your body with Halodyne. Well, I too have struggled with GI issues over the years. I have something called Lynch syndrome. So gut health is extremely important to me. And while gut health awareness has increased, it's led to a wellness trend that's inspired a host of questionable marketing and some false claims. Now you've seen the word probiotic attached to all kinds of supplements, drinks, even more. They may claim to deliver the healthy microorganisms our gut needs for proper function, but all too often the promises are in fact too good to be true.

Thankfully, I became aware of a company called Seed and their flagship product, the Daily Synbiotic. Seed's Daily Synbiotic offers 24 clinically researched strains of microorganisms in a single dose. These strains support gut health and can improve regularity and relieve bloating, sometimes within as little as 24 to 48 hours. To me, what really sets Seed's daily symbiotic apart is the delivery system. While some products may offer the right strains, they're fragile, they rarely survive the trip through the gut, doesn't get where it needs to go, but Seed uses a capsule-in-capsule design that helps ensure the probiotic reaches your colon, which is where they often are needed.

I have been taking Seed's Daily Symbiotic, and I really encourage you to check out their story and the science behind what they do. To try it for yourself, just go to seed.com slash drdrew. Use code drdrew20 for 15% off your first month of daily symbiotic. That is seed.com slash drdrew. Use code drdrew20. As we're gradually moving back to opening schools and businesses and, of course, our in-person interactions, I want to remind you this is all time with cold and flu season getting going.

Staying hydrated is key to helping your body deal with the added stress and with the upcoming flu season. My regular fans have heard me talk about a product called Hydrolyte for a long time now. It's an amazing rapid rehydration drink. It's a mix that, well, we're obsessed with here. I'm excited to announce they've just released Hydrolyte Plus Immunity just in time for cold and flu season. Hydrolyte Plus Immunity starts with their fast absorbing electrolytes and adds a host of immune boosting ingredients. Each single serve, easy, poor drink mix contains a thousand milligrams of vitamin C and 300 milligrams of elderberry extract

creates what is hopefully immune boosting formula that's high in antioxidants and zinc. Combining this with Hydrolyte's seven key electrolytes, it's a fantastic way to stay proactive and properly hydrated. Hydrolyte Plus Immunity comes in convenient, easy-to-pour powder sticks that rapidly dissolve in water and make a great-tasting drink that has 75% less sugar than your typical sports drink. It uses all natural flavors, and it is gluten-free, dairy-free, caffeine-free, non-GMO, and it is vegan. And you can find Hydrolyte Plus by visiting hydrolyte.com slash drdrew. Again, that's H-Y-D-R-A-L-Y-T-E dot com slash D-R-D-R-A-W. Be sure to use our code drdrew25 at checkout for a special discount.

There you are. Everything okay? Yeah, it's good. It's good to see you. Do you know, Susan, I was so excited that we got you are. Everything okay? Yeah, it's good. It's good to see you. Do you know, Susan, I was so excited that we got you back. So, you know, I'm just flashing on something. I think I saw you speak years ago on a cruise ship off Central America's coast. Does that sound familiar?

Like Panama Canal or something? That sounds very familiar. Yeah. To the Panama Canal. We were on that ship. It was a YPO ship. sounds very familiar. Yeah. The Panama canal. We, we were, we were on that ship. It was a YPO ship. Yeah. And,

uh, I, I think it was back. You were still practicing back then, but you, Oh, you have triplets. We had triplets.

Oh, we had triplets. Yeah. Go ahead. Dr. Carson. We, we,

well, we had three kids. They were little kids at that time. Yeah. Uh, they all played instruments. They played the string quartet. They did a couple of concerts on the ship. Oh, fantastic and one of my sons is is now uh vice president of this region

for the ypo so oh my goodness isn't that isn't that interesting but if you remember that that did you were you on the entire that entire cruise the entire time yes yes yeah i will tell people we met the president of every country we went to including fidel castro which was crazy and he spoke and he spoke for a long time they asked him one question and he spoke for three hours so put put on your psychiatric head for a say your old psychiatry half again personally i was like was like, oh my God, this guy's a derailed manic. He just, he was barely making sense. Yeah. It was really something. He was, he was derailed. He was, he was grand. It was just full on bipolar disorder. I mean, there it was. So that was

really something. So you were in that room with us that the room and the room itself, if I could set it for people essentially had the best offer that 1970s Soviet architecture could muster. It was really – but it was such an amazing experience. And good for your son. It was. YPO just does amazing, amazing stuff. They really do good things. So back to wraparound services. I was saying before the computer glitched, which is that I bristle at the term wraparound services because I've had multiple conversations with multiple bureaucratic leaders, mayors, city council people, county board of supervisors, and they'll immediately say, we got wraparound services. And I go, what are you talking about exactly? Well, they have no idea. I go, look, you need

to understand that's psychiatric care. We give wraparound services where? In a psychiatric hospital. Now we can do a lot of it with assisted outpatient and residential. We can do a lot, but let's not mince words. It's psychiatric care. We used to only do that in a hospital. Now we can do that in other settings. It's psychiatric care. We used to only do that in a hospital. Now we can do that in other settings. It's psychiatric care for psychiatric patients. I don't like mincing words about it anymore because they'd really, it just becomes a euphemism. They toss out.

They don't even realize what they're talking about. Yeah, well, if they were really serious, they would say, what is needed in order to restore this person and put them on the right trajectory? In this state- And that's a lot of stuff. Yeah, a lot of stuff. right trajectory. And that's a lot of stuff. Yeah, a lot of stuff. That's right. That's a lot of stuff.

Exactly. A team, a team of people, which is, again, that's one of the reasons I like working in psychiatric hospital settings. Done well, it is team. You do need teams to treat psychiatric patients. That's how that works. Absolutely. You know, I don't know if you have this experience with COVID, but it's shrunk my working memory

and it's made me just, I'll block all of a sudden. I'll be going down a thought part and it'll just be gone. Don't blame that on COVID. Oh, I had it before. I had it with the aging. Trust me, I had it before, but it became noticeably worse immediately post-COVID. It's really funny. So while you were away with your fixing your computer, my wife mentioned that I guess the stimulus package is going through for infrastructure, which I'm very much in favor of. I think that's a – I was surprised that the previous administration didn't get to that, but who knows what the Congress would have done with it. But she asked the question that is in most people's mind is how you pay for

that? Who's paying for that? Where's this come from? As somebody who's been in Washington, do you have any sense of what they're thinking? I haven't seen anybody really talk about what they're going to do. Well, you know, that particular infrastructure package is very much like the last COVID relief package. That's just the title, but it's filled with all kinds of things that don't have to do with infrastructure. And what's happening, and this is a particularly sensitive area for me. I spent my whole life dealing with children as a pediatric neurosurgeon with scholarships through the Carson Scholars Fund.

And I really feel very much, I think, like Thomas Jefferson, that it is immoral to steal from the future of our children. And that's what we're doing by just escalating the national debt to such high levels. Somebody has to pay for that. And of course, in the short run, they'll try to pay for it by saying, let's massively increase taxes on the rich. But you could take all the money from the rich and it's not going to help you much if you continue along this pathway. We have got to start being a little smarter. Yeah. And there's this sort of Keynesian approach that has really spiraled. I mean, the so-called Austrian school of economics has been sort of sidelined, Mises and those famous economists. And this Keynesian approach has taken hold in which debt is good.

My suspicion is they want to inflate their way out of it a little bit, maybe a lot, which would be… There's no question that's coming. That's on the way. Yeah, yeah. Massive inflation. Yeah. I hope not to the degree that Argentina had, but it's going to be significant. And there's prices for things that we do. There's a law of consequences, and we're going to have to pay for this.

Right. And my wife is back there doing sort of a touchdown sign because this... And it's funny. We've been hearing about the debt for the last eight years, and now all of a sudden nothing about the debt while we inflate it. It's very interesting. That's what I thought. I thought maybe somebody had a plan that I didn't know about.

Well, I'll tell you what's really interesting. About 60 years ago, Nikita Khrushchev said of the United States, your grandchildren's children will live under communism, and we won't have to fire a shot. Now, what did he mean by that? He meant that they would actually fundamentally change America. They would gain control of our school systems so you could indoctrinate the kids. They would gain control of our school systems so you could indoctrinate the kids. They would gain control of the media so that you could spoon-feed the people what you wanted them to hear. They would remove God and replace it with government, and they would increase the debt to such a level that you could justify massive tax increases and redistribution of wealth,

all of which puts the government in complete control. It sure feels like, I mean, this last exercise was stunning to me. And the other part was stunning to me was that people seem to like telling other people to shelter in your bedroom or how to live your life. And people seem to like being told that. That was sort of really surprising to me that there was sort of some sort of phenomenology of gratification on both sides. Well, I think the majority. Go ahead.

Yeah, I think the majority of Americans probably don't necessarily want that. But people have been bludgeoned into acceptance. You know, just go sit in a corner and hope nobody notices you and nobody cancels you. It really is the opposite of the reason that people came from every nation to America in the first place. They wanted liberty. They wanted justice. And, you know, the fundamental change that others have wanted for a very long time is one in which you give good. We're going to take care of you.

We're going to take care of your medical needs, and we're going to take care of your housing, and we're going to take care of your food, and we're just going to take care of everything because we're such wonderful people. It sounds really good, but it never works. Are you working on a road out with the American Cornerstone Institute? That's the very purpose of the American Cornerstone Institute. AmericanCornerstone.org. Please go to it and listen to what we're talking about.

Right now we're emphasizing the Declaration of Independence. We put it on there. A lot of people have never read it. We want you to read it, give your comments about it. We're going to be having a program in a few weeks to discuss some of the questions with some experts. And then we're going to do the Constitution, which is an amazing document. We really need to know about that. We'll be starting a program this summer called The Little Patriots, sort of like the Cub Scouts, but we're emphasizing, teaching them the real history of

America, warts included. We're inhabited by people, and people are imperfect, so they do imperfect things. You don't try to bury those things and hide those things. What you do is you learn from those things, and you let them help you to move forward. This country has had an amazing history. We should not be ashamed of our country because of some of the bad things that were done. And this country has changed the world. If this country goes down, the world goes back to the way it was pre-America with all these despotic leaders who just trample on anybody who's weaker than they are. This is not the kind of world that we want. And we need to recognize that the United States has played an enormous role in stabilization of the world.

And as far as I can understand, we're the only country founded, as you said, on an idea or a set of ideas or principles at least. And Abraham Lincoln felt that the founding principle was found in the opening volley of the Declaration of Independence. He felt there was a principle antecedent to the Constitution and he thought it was laid out in the Declaration. And he said conceived in liberty yeah yeah but the fact that we it feels like we're we're moving through a time where we're trying to reconcile with the fact that we didn't live up to that principle uh and and we just didn't we and we made compromises and uh and if you read the history of the Constitution, there would have been no Constitution if they didn't make compromises, but they did it. So what do we do with all this?

It doesn't mean that we can't get there still. Like I said, it's an idea. between the United States and many other countries is our Judeo-Christian values and the principles that were put forth by our founding fathers. And even though they themselves were imperfect, I think they were inspired in putting together these documents, which have made us the longest lasting republic in the history of the world. And there's no reason that we can't improve upon what's been done already. I think a lot of people are starting to recognize a lot of the things that were done. Even now, there are things that are ridiculous that we're doing, for instance, in the area of housing. If somebody is getting housing subsidies and they get a raise,

they have to immediately report that so that their rent can go up. That's just asinine. If somebody comes into the household who has an income, you have to report that so that their rent can go up. That's not very good for family formation and stabilization. These things are actually antithetical to putting people on the right trajectory for independence. Yeah, I agree. And I have been sort of dismayed in recent years that the principles aren't being taught or at least looked at and you can you can choose to dismiss them if you want but to not even teach them i i don't know that's that seems anathema to me yeah it is well you know we have a lot to teach a lot to be proud of and uh you know

that's what we're going to be doing and going out there and talking to people and doing things, not just thinking about, you know, they're think tanks and they are do tanks. We're going to be a think tank and a do tank. Right. Because now is the time to get it done. We can't wait much longer. One of my, one of the individuals who has become one of my favorite American historical figures is Frederick Douglass. And through reading his autobiographies and his biographies and learning more about him, I mean, scales fell from my eyes. I can only describe it as literally scales falling from my eyes. It was amazing.

Amazing, just unbelievable. And the rhetorical clarity with which he expressed himself, it's so compelling. And, I, and he, he had some really interesting things to say about Abraham Lincoln, who was my other, one of my other favorite historical figures. I was like, no, no, you don't mean it, do you? And then I was persuaded he's right. He's absolutely right. He's just right. And my point though, was the, one of the things I really zeroed in on that I did not fully understand and feel ashamed that I didn't as a result of really getting to know his history was the immediate post-Civil War period, really the 15 or 20 years after the Civil War, where I don't want to measure atrocities,

but there were atrocities perpetrated during that period of time that I think we've like pushed out of our collective consciousness because it was so bad. It was, I mean, we literally had, we had marauding war gangs and people left over from the civil war, just, just mowing people down. It was horrific. And I rarely hear it talked about, you know, we, we all, of course we all talk all talk about slavery, 1619 Project and everything, but that immediate post-Civil War period was like nothing else in terms of its brutality and horror. It was horrible.

And some of the communities, particularly African-American communities that were built up during that time with very hard work and brilliant people were absolutely destroyed. Yes. And nothing was done about it. Yeah. And more places than one in Florida and Oklahoma and a number of places that happened.

And a lot of people don't know those stories. And when people worry about, talk about lynchings and things, lynchings weren't until after Civil War. If you lynch somebody's property, they'd kill you before that. But afterward, lynching was done all the time. And we don't, and it's so horrific, we don't want to look at it. I don't think we want to look at it as a country. We need to, because you talk about

intergenerational trauma. Oh, man, that's got to still affect a lot of people. Right. But the other thing that we do have to recognize, and you're not supposed to say this, but we have also made a lot of progress on the racial front, tremendous progress. Life is so different now than it was when I was growing up in Detroit and Boston. And I was a terrible student, and that's what was expected. We lived just across the track from the white versus the black area, So we went to the white school. And when I was at the bottom of the class, that's what was expected. My mother made us start reading books. And within a year and a half, I was the top of the class. That wasn't expected. And by the time I was in junior high school, I was in the eighth grade, and there was a special award for the student with the highest academic achievement.

And, you know, you take your report card to each teacher, and they would put your mark on it. My last one, and I had all A's so far, was band. I was really good in band. The band teacher gave me a C so he could ruin my report card so I wouldn't get number one. Yeah, that's the way things were then. But to his chagrin, it turned out band didn't count, so I got it anyway. And at the ceremony, one of the teachers got up

and berated the other students for letting a black student be number one, which means they weren't working hard enough. That's the way things used to be. Did that motivate you? That was be. Did that motivate you? That was acceptable. Did that motivate you? It did. Yeah.

I just said, I'll show her. Yeah. But I think people like that just were ignorant. They weren't necessarily evil. They truly believed that a black person couldn't achieve. I remember we had a European math substitute teacher, and she wrote all these notes to my mother. It was like, how could this kid be so smart?

It's like a monkey. It's like, number one, I don't understand. It's just crazy. It's awful. And we're laughing at it, but it's like you can get pissed too. You know, it's just not, nothing about it is okay. Thank God you had the personality to turn it into a positive. Well, I do understand that people are products of their environment.

It's just like when I first came to Johns Hopkins as an intern, you know, the nurses would always assume that I was an orderly when I came on the floor with scrubs and say, you know, Mr. Jones isn't ready to be taken to the OR yet. And I would say, well, I'm sorry, he's not ready, but I'm Dr. Carson. They turn about 18 shades of red and I would be very nice to them. And believe me, I had a friend for life. Not only that, I sensed from the way you tell the story, you loved it. That's awesome. Do me a favor though. For those who don't know that dramatic turnaround story, I'm very interested in moments of change and you have a very dramatic moment of change story. Do you mind sharing it? No.

There are a few things that, you know, I was just the worst student that you can possibly imagine. And I thought I was stupid. All my classmates thought I was stupid. Teachers thought I was stupid. It was only my mother who felt differently. And she was a domestic. But she only had less than a third grade education, but my mother was a wise person. And she observed in the homes that she cleaned, which were beautiful homes, that these people didn't sit around watching TV all day. They did

a lot of reading and strategizing. So she came home and imposed that on me and my brother. We were not happy campers. In today's world, we would have called social services and they would have taken her away in handcuffs, but we had to read those books. It made such a big difference. Particularly, I started reading about scientists and explorers and surgeons and entrepreneurs. And I began to realize that the person who had the most to do with what happened to you in life was you. It wasn't somebody else. I stopped listening to all the people who were saying, you can't do this and you can't do that.

I said, forget about you guys. I'm going to be a doctor. And within a year and a half i was the top of the class the same students who were calling me dummy were coming to me saying how do you work this problem benny how do you work this problem i'd say sit at my feet youngster but uh it changed dramatically uh you know the whole trajectory of my life the same thing for my brother you know he became a rocket scientist. I became a brain surgeon. But a lot of it had to do with what you thought you could do. The human brain

is an amazing organ system. Yes, it is. Hundreds of billions of interconnections. It can process more than 2 million bits of information in one second. You can't overload the brain. You hear people saying, don't learn this, you'll overload your brain. You can't do it. If you learned one new fact every second, it would take you more than 3 million years to begin to challenge your brain. Can't do it. So it's a matter of programming it the right way. And that's why it's so essential. Right now, during all this COVID stuff, get these kids in school and start teaching them again. You know, when they lose certain things, they get behind and they stay behind. And it has a very negative

impact, particularly on those who can't afford the fancy computers and the high speed internet and the tutors. And, you know, we have no idea the damage that we're doing to these kids. You and I both know it. I mean, we come from mental health. And to me, this is going to be the greatest misadventure of this entire epidemic. Because we'll have untold repercussions. It will be on and on. And we're already seeing all my pediatric psychiatry friends just say anxiety, depression, anxiety, depression, suicide, anxiety, depression, substance, anxiety, depression, anxiety, depression.

It's all they're seeing. And they can't, they can't, not enough of them to see all the material. So it's bad. And that's just that phenomenon, the learning phenomenon, the social phenomenon, the God knows what other behavioral issues we're going to have to help with. It's too much. But I was thinking about, in terms of that moment of change, that I don't know if you want to tell the story,

but the story about the belt buckle. Oh, yeah. Well, after I got things under control academically, I still had a terrible temper. You know, I almost put somebody's eye out once with throwing a rock at him and you seem like that kind of guy to me i immediately i guess i can get very well you know i would i would just get so angry and i didn't really care what the consequences were i just had to inflict harm on people yeah and then one day, someone angered me, and I happened to have a large camping knife,

and I tried to stab him in the abdomen. And fortunately, under his clothing, he had a large metal belt buckle and a knife blade struck with such force it broke. And he was terrified, but I was even more horrified than he was, because I realized that I was trying to kill somebody over nothing. I locked myself in the bathroom. I started contemplating my life, realized that even though I had turned things around academically, the only place I was going was jail, reform school, or the grave. I didn't want that to

happen to me. There was a Bible, and I picked it up and started reading and there were all these verses about anger and uh also verses about fools and it seemed like they were all written about me and i stayed in that bathroom for three hours praying and contemplating and reading and it came to an understanding during that time that the reason I was always angry is because I was selfish. It was always about me. Somebody did something to me. They were in my space. And if you could just step outside of the center of the circle and let it be about somebody else. That was the last day I had an angry outburst. And that made the biggest difference in my life. And I believe that God can change people, but they have to be willing to be changed.

Right. That is the big conundrum in change, is that willingness piece. I have found that many moments of change are, as part of it, the individual is able to see themselves as they actually are, or maybe another way of saying are, as part of it, the individual is able to see themselves as they actually are, or maybe another way of saying it, seeing themselves with a new pair of glasses. And I'm wondering, in the weeks or even months leading up to that moment of change,

was there anybody new in your life, new relationships? Do you remember anything like that? A religious, maybe a clergy or something? Was there anything that was sort of unusual relationally at that point? I think it was just that I drew closer to God. But you understand particularly with the interaction that you've had with drug addiction. It doesn't really matter what you do until a person wants to change. They have to really want to do it. And as a result, I mean, you can help them get there. There's motivational skills and things you can do to help them get there. And you can have a carrot and a stick to help them get there. And oftentimes they do get there, but they have to get there where it's coming from inside them, where they go, huh, you know, this, I'd rather have that carrot. I don't really want

that stick. I guess, I wonder if I take a look at what they're telling me, but, but, but I, because I'm interested in those moments of change, I'm going to tell you people that have really severe motivational disturbances like addiction, anosognosia, like serious mental illness, I have found that a new relationship gives them that opportunity to step outside of themselves and look at themselves. They'll often say, I passed by a mirror and all of a sudden I saw myself and I was horrified. I was a mess. I was strung out on this and that. And the weeks leading up, they're like, yeah, I met a dude that's sort of interesting. He was an artist. I don't normally hang out with a guy like that, but we'd talk a lot.

And it just gets, like you're saying, gets you outside of yourself so you can see yourself. And that phenomenon. Go ahead. That happened to me during that three-hour period in the bathroom. Yeah. I was a different in the bathroom. Yeah. I was a different person after that. Yeah. So that phenomenon of either – somebody needs to characterize it because it's either developing an observing ego or developing an objective outside-of-self perspective.

That's a really interesting phenomenon i rarely hear people talk about and very seldom do people actually stop and interest the introspection where they actually look at themselves well but they often understand who they are but they often do it from where they're at which is a selfish selfish, grandiose, whatever, as opposed to stepping outside and looking at yourself from the outside, from an objective with a new pair of glasses. And I'm going to posit that somewhere in that phenomenon is the phenomenon of consciousness. Consciousness is woven into this sort of phenomenon somehow. And this ability to, I don't know what to call it,

be outside of self is a deeply important phenomenon that we rarely talk about. What's the first thing we get people do? Like, give yourself up, you know, give it up to something else outside of yourself. That's the first thing we tell people with addiction. And to the extent that they do that is the extent to which they succeed.

You're right. You sound like a psychiatrist. Well, I've spent, I spent 30 years working in a psychiatric hospital. I'm an internist. So if you'll understand, I have this, Dr. Carson, I have this very crazy professional experience where I was still doing critical care medicine when internists could do critical care. I did a lot of that. I was good at that. I was going to be a cardiologist and I just sort of sidetracked and all these other things. I did inpatient general medicine, outpatient general medicine, and I did this addiction thing eight hours a day, all simultaneously for about 20

years. And so as a result, I have all this experience on humanity, the human experience. I've experienced it in a way that I don't think people, I don't think our peers are getting that breadth of experience that I had anymore anywhere. And so my goal lately

has been just to unload it, just try to give it to people as much as I can. Because it's... Well, it's making a difference. I hope. I hope so. It's... I hope, I hope. I hope so.

I hope. I just want to thank you for your willingness to do that on the behalf of so many people and on behalf of our nation. We need Dr. Drews in our society. And we need Dr. Carsons too. And I'm glad you have an institute now that we can call upon. Now, is it for volunteers or funding or what can we do to help you? Or all the above?

Funding, volunteers, all the above. I would be happy if you just go there and start reading material and become aware of some of the issues that face our nation and start learning for yourself. Don't be spoon-fed by the media. I'm very disappointed with the media because they've forgotten the reason that they're

the only business that's protected by our Constitution. And that was because they were supposed to disseminate information in an unbiased fashion to the people so that the country could be run by the will of the people, not manipulate the opinion of the people. And I think a large amount of the decline that we've had is secondary to the loss of responsible media. And I hope that some of the young correspondents will take it upon themselves to help change that and regain the honorable status that the media should have. I hope you're right. I don't see that. I feel like that part is out of the barn. And when people talk about the media the way you just did, I immediately have a flashback. For some reason, when I was a teenager, I was watching a

television interview. It might've been 60 minutes or something. And it was looking into the, the television media in Russia and the USSR at the time. And they interviewed this, they were, they were interviewed. There was one sort of very famous anchor. I don't remember his name, but he seemed like a state, you know, very substantial dude. And they were hammering him, you know, you're delivering the word of the Kremlin. You're not giving information. You're just parroting what they want you to say. And he said, hey, look, and I'll never forget this. He said, in Russia, media is an instrument of politics. your country it's a it's a commercial interest but it's going to end up in the same place and i thought wow that was 40 50 years ago i heard

that i thought and it just stayed with me goes it's just a different set of priorities but what one is not better than the other and they end up in the same sort of place. Isn't that interesting? Yeah. When you think about it, I mean, so as opposed to when you're serving the financial gods, it's not different. It doesn't take you substantively to a different place than if you're serving the bureaucratic gods. You end up in— Kind of what Khrushchev was saying, didn't he? Yeah.

When he said that we would end up there. Well, maybe he knew how this might work. But hopefully he's not right. Because I think people say these things based on societies in general. I think there's something different about America and American people. And I actually believe that they're going to respond to what's going on, and they're not going to let our country go down that pathway. I really don't think so. Well, let's have more conversations across the next few years where we either celebrate the

fact that it doesn't or continue to think what we can do to steer it back from the abyss. Dr. Carson, the American Cornerstone Institute. I want you to go to AmericanCornerstone.org where you can be a part of and read as he tells you, read what's there and contribute if you were inspired or maybe volunteer. Great to see you as always. It's so inspiring. Well, thank you, Dr. Drew. Thank you. As I said, I'm very sincere about what you do and what you're doing for our society. I really appreciate As I said, I'm very sincere about what you do and what you're doing for our society. I really appreciate it. Well, I'm just making noise.

You're actually, as you said, you're a doing organization. So thank you for doing it. Absolutely. Take care. Thank you, sir. That is Dr. Ben Carson. I hope you enjoyed that conversation. I always love talking to him.

He's an interesting guy and I cannot emphasize enough what it means to have been a neurosurgeon who heads a neurosurgical department at Johns Hopkins University. That is the most rarefied error there is. I mean, there's maybe 50 other people in the country that get near, that get near that level of, uh, rarefied achievement. And it's, it's,

you know, and then let's add in all the other things he's done for the government and running for president and things like that. It's good. And I, I, I don't know how you can be critical of Ben Carson. People are,

I know. And, um, I challenge you on that one because, uh, his heart's in the right place. Susan, anything. Yeah. You feel good about that? We his heart's in the right place. Susan, anything?

Absolutely. Yeah, you feel good about that? We were having a chat about band leaders. You and he? No, he got the C from the band class. Oh, on the stream here, we're having a thing about it. Yes, I saw that go by. Yeah.

I wonder what that was all about. I have to also say they were sexist in the 70s towards. Well, I was going to say that. The women have put up with something very, very similar to what he was putting with like a woman yeah tell the story i had a we had a blind test they were recording us we were auditioning oh yes seventh grade for the entertainer right and let's set the stage she there was a competition for somebody to play the solo lead with the orchestra on it was only it was a band it was only a clarinet only clarinets were being tried out right right so we had first chair first

clarinet second chair first chair second clarinet i was always second chair first chair second clarinet and we went in and my mom bought me she borrowed a buffet clarinet. It was a wood clarinet. And I practiced and practiced and we did the taping and I won. And the teacher said, this cannot be. It is not you. And I went home and I cried to my mom. I said, I won, but he said, it's not me. So they made us do it again.

And I won again. Wow. And he wasn't happy. Wow. Because his prize student was male. I didn't think of it at the time as a male female. So essentially you were a behavior problem way back then too. Is that what you're saying? Well, I had ADD.

But, you know. No, I think I had a lot of talent, but now looking back, I think that he had it out for me. I was a cute little blonde chick, you know, with an attitude, maybe, I don't know. Um, but I was very talented and he didn't believe it was me. And it was just, it's kind of funny now. But, but that reminded me of what Ben Carson was talking about. Your story, there were no black people in my school. So I was, you were the, you were the,

you were the one to get the, there was one black kid in my school. He played the, the, the saxophone and there was only one saxophone player. And so sexism was the, was the, uh, yeah, manifestation. And I, and I can totally understand that because, because I don't know why the, or the conductor is always kind of an idiot. Like later I found out he was hanging out with underage girls, one of which was a friend of my cousin. Right, enough. So who knows who these guys are? They can't judge somebody who's that intellectual at that age. So there's more to it. you think about Dr. Carson and some of the things he was saying, I think we're going through a kind

of a reckoning that I consider to be a good thing if we can equilibrate, if we can find our way back to a balance. I have no problem with us taking a hard look at ourselves in a way we haven't in the past. And your story is one of those stories that we need to look at. And so is his. Yeah, it was a lot different then. I don't think that would happen nowadays. Booty fill, my COVID experience was bad, not because of my cancer. No, it's because of my age and metabolic syndrome.

That's it strictly. And I'm being unluckily. I get nailed by viruses all the time. And I knew, so I was trying hard to get the vaccine. I knew if I got COVID, it would be bad. I knew it. And I know, for instance, when I get the vaccine next week,

I'm going to get blasted. I know it. That's just what happens to me with vaccines and viruses. What time of week is yours? Thursday. Thursday. What are you doing Friday? Hopefully, let's look at that. You'll be fine. Yeah, hopefully I'm fine, but we'll see. I will be after dark, so we'll see how that goes so everybody thank you for stopping by I appreciate it again I'm always inspired to talk to Dr. Carson and I'm glad to see he's out there fighting the good fight

what do we got coming up guys oh I love him now you know why I chase him down and try to have lunch with him and like you said a neurosurgeon is rarefied air it's not just neurosurgeon neurosurgeon at the top of his game a subcategory of neurosurgeon is rarefied air. It's just, it's not just neurosurgeon neurosurgeon at the top of his game,

a sub category of neurosurgeon, pediatric neurosurgeon. I know at, at Johns Hopkins running department, a baby who had brain surgery, right? That's right. You had,

they're the nerdiest, smartest, best at what they do. People. So, so that's save your child's life. Yeah. So that it would have been him if we'd been on the East coast. Yeah. At the time child's life yeah so that it would have been

him if we'd been on the east coast yeah at the time yeah i mean i would have been happy to have it i would at that point you're just like when you know that you have a good surgeon yep um the best so what's coming up tomorrow we have that guy with the Dr. Prasad. Oh, Prasad. Damn, this is a good week. Sorry. So Dr. Prasad is an extraordinary oncologist who has an amazing podcast called Plenary Sessions. He has been thinking out loud lately about what we've been doing with COVID

and what the actual science is. And he is getting himself in trouble as a result, as he says. I got a little bit of trouble he keeps saying in his podcast and uh it'll be very interesting to to talk to him he's a super smart guy super um well-meaning another guy who's breathing rarefied air um but uh you'll you'll enjoy this i think nicole and jemmy next week and then we'll probably do a dose of dr drew with the with the um with the followers you know maybe do clubhouse or we'll probably do a dose of Dr. Drew with the followers, you know, maybe do Clubhouse or we'll do Instagram Live.

And I would love to, Caleb, if you could tag where a couple of stories that Dr. Carson's told, I'd love to push out on social media. Oh, yeah, definitely. I've been making notes. Yeah, people need to hear those stories. So if we can just pull those out. So crazy. It was in the room with us with Castro. Right. I thought, see, I was always under the sense that this was something my whole family went on where I was part of a faculty and we were taken on this cruise with a bunch of wealthy people. Under the age of 30. Yeah. And we were not them. We were the help. We were the faculty. They were all worth $50 million.

And they all had, we all had young kids. Yeah. Everybody thought I was the nanny for the, in the, yeah. And so in any event, he,

he was one of the lecturers, one of the key, a keynote lecturer one night. And I, I went and watched it. I'll never forget it. And when he was starting writing for president, I thought,

I think that's the same guy we heard. I remember I kept saying, I think that's the same guy we heard i remember i kept saying i think that's the same guy i remember the little quartet thing and also but the weird thing about the castro thing was that our kids were with us so we were 100 of us trapped in this conference center and our kids wanted to go out and see cuba and they wouldn't let us for four hours we sat there and the kids were like mommy i had to take my kids out into the lobby because they were starting to bounce off the wall there. He's boring. He's boring, which he was.

And now they're pissed. Why did you tell us we were with Fidel Castro? And then they wanted to leave and we had to tell them, no, we'll be thrown in jail if we try to leave. Well, there were guards everywhere. Out in the lobby, there were guards everywhere too. And I said, this is a communist country and I want you to understand how this feels. And by the way, our kids were doing cartwheels in the lobby while the machine guns were pointed at us. It was quite an experience, but they made it through. We have a video somewhere. We should find it. So it was, it was nicely, it was a nice confirmation to hear Dr. Carson's impression, Jack diagnostically of,

uh, Fidel Castro, because mine at the time was this guy is an untreated out of control, manic patient. And that you heard Carson say the same thing. Yeah. I mean, of course, not of course. I mean,

it was pretty, people are pretty aware of that. Wow. Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Caleb nation and Susan Pinsky. This is just a reminder that the discussions here are not a substitute for medical care or medical evaluation. This is purely for educational and entertainment purposes.

I'm a licensed physician with over 35 years of experience, but this is not a replacement for your personal physician, nor is it medical care. If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, don't call me. Call 911. If you're feeling hopeless or suicidal, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255, anytime, 24-7, for free support and guidance. You can find more of my recommended organizations and helpful resources at drdrew.com slash help.