VICTOR: Dr. Carson, thanks for joining us on Turning Point. It's a pleasure having you on the program.
DR CARSON: Thanks for having me.
VICTOR: You know, someone once said that the place with the greatest ideas in the world is not a library, it's not an organization, it's actually the cemetery. By that, they mean that millions of people died never fulfilling their dreams. Do you think that one of the reasons why people never take risks or never fulfill their dreams is fear?
DR CARSON: Absolutely. People are so risk adverse and a lot of that has been stimulated, you know, by the culture in which we live and the media and, you know, I'm not slamming anybody, but by the fact that there's such an incredible proliferation of lawyers and legal people in our society and it's created an atmosphere of fear. And when you really stop and you think about it, there's nothing that has ever been accomplished by mankind, by people who didn't take risk. And you look at all the great warriors in the Bible and-and the people that we admire, they all had to take risks. None of them just sort of sat in their tent under a tree and said, "Oh, let everything happen for me." It didn't work that way. And it doesn't work that way today either.
VICTOR: Well, in your new book, uh which is a very fascinating read, "Take the Risk," you make a very compelling case for risk taking. Now, the word risk has different connotations with different people. For some people it's reckless abandon, for some people it's even a matter of life and death. How do you make the distinction between a calculated risk and a reckless one?
DR CARSON: Well first of all, you have to realize that we cannot do anything without taking risks. We might we think we're doing things without taking risks, but what if you say, "I'm not going to take any risks today at all? I'm just going to lay here in the bed and listen to the television and watch TV. I'm not doing anything else."
Well, you're taking a risk by that. First of all, by being inactive, there's a risk that you might develop stasis in your venous system, you might develop a blood clot, which later on, you know, might immobilize to your lungs and kill you.
Secondly, do you know for sure that you're not going to get fired from your job? And, you know, there becomes risk with everything, so what we have to do instead of saying, "I'm not taking any risks," is to say, "Which are the calculated risks that are reasonable to take."
And, just to show you how crazy it is, you know, most people don't think a whole lot about getting in their car and driving to work without recognizing that 1 in 25 people they encounter in another car are intoxicated and that their chances of being injured or killed in a car accident are much greater than their chances of dying in an airplane accident.
And yet, how many people get out and drive everyday, but are terrified to fly in an airplane? Just to give you some idea of how irrational those fears are. So, if you're going to be a rational human being, and that's why God gave us these incredible brains, you need to be able to sit down and say, "Wait a minute, now, I know I'm going to be taking a bunch of risks today, so let's rationally decide which are the ones that are going to be beneficial to me and that are going to lead me to where I need to go."
VICTOR: Now, you ask yourself a number of questions before taking a risk.
DR CARSON: Right.
VICTOR: What are those questions and how can viewers watching the program today apply the questions in their own life? What are the questions and how do they apply them?
DR CARSON: Well, there are four basic questions, and that is, if you are considering doing something, you ask, "What's the best thing that can happen if I do this? And what's the worst thing that can happen if I do this? What's the best thing that can happen if I don't do it? And what's the worst thing that can happen if I don't do it?"
And, you know, that has worked so well for me as a physician, particularly when getting into, you know, complex cases, and sometimes into controversial cases where when I ask those questions, there was only one that led to a potentially good outcome, and that was to do it.
And it made it much simpler for me, but it works so well in so many other settings. You know, I was talking about it on a radio interview on NPR and weeks later I got a note from some marine biologists who were having a very difficult ecological situation they were dealing with, and they had applied those four questions and came up with their solution, and they wanted to know if they could acknowledge me in their scientific paper.
But, you know, the fact of the matter is, you know, when you -- when you do that, what I call "BWA," Best Worst Analysis, what it really ensures is that you've considered all the possibilities. And so many times, you know, we recklessly decide to do something without considering the possibilities.
You're much less likely to wind up in a situation saying, "Why didn't I think of that," if you will do a simple BWA before you leap.
VICTOR: That recklessness is one of the options and then the other option is to say, "Well, I'm going to consider all the options and guess what, it's not really as bad as I thought it was going to be."
DR CARSON: Exactly. This is particularly important when you're raising children because, little mistakes with children can have profound lifetime consequences. And if we stifle a kid because we're afraid that something may happen, and they internalize that, and then they become extremely timid and lose confidence in themselves that can have lifelong consequences.
By the same token, if you're always pushing them to do things with reckless disregard, that's going to have, you know, significant consequences also. So by doing these kinds of analysis, it helps us to be better parents as well.
VICTOR: As one of the world's leading neurosurgeons, you've had to take many risks, actually, you've taken risks when some of your colleagues, experts in your field, have told you not to take the risk you're about to take, but you've still gone ahead and heeded that inner voice on the inside, why so?
DR CARSON: Well, first of all, recognize that I have a enormous amount of faith in God and I ask Him to give me wisdom in everything that I do, and then also because I do ask those questions. There was one case that's talked about in the book where a little girl had gotten hit by a truck, her neurologic situation was deteriorating rapidly and it looked like there was no hope for her.
And I was rushing her to the operating room and one of my senior colleagues, who was a national expert in head trauma said, "You're wasting your time, it's a ridiculous thing to do, go do something else." But, you know, I really stopped and I thought about it and I said, "It's the only chance that she has. There is no other possibility for her." And she wasn't dead.
And we went in and we did some pretty radical stuff, but, you know, I talk about how later on I met that same young girl who was introducing me to her daughter now. And the fact of the matter is a combination, I think of using this incredible brain that God has given you and asking God to give you wisdom is unbeatable. This is an unbeatable combination in this world.
But, you know, there's another risk: Do you trust God? That requires a risk because most people would rather trust themselves. And they would rather trust what man is saying and what their fellow people are saying; theyr'e much more concerned about how they look in front of everybody else.
For me and my professional career, that has definitely been a risk to publicly proclaim, you know, my love for God and my faith in Him, and it has led me into some very interesting dialogs, on national stages and talking about faith and science and evolution and creation, all these things.
VICTOR: What kind of responses do you get from your colleagues, most of whom I'm sure are skeptics when it comes to the issue -- when it comes to the matter of faith?
DR CARSON: Well, interesting enough, the number of skeptics in the beginning was very large and as my career has gone on -- because I think most people said, "Oh, this guy's a flash in the pan and this stuff that he's talking about, he'll disappear." But see, I've never disappeared.
And good things continue to happen and that's because I believe of my relationship with God. I have far more people now coming to me and saying, you know, "Why do you believe and can we discuss this?" And I get a lot of people who are very interested now from the scientific community.
VICTOR: You actually, in your book, talk about the risk of living a life of faith. Why do you say that?
DR CARSON: Because it's much easier to adopt the politically correct impression that, you know, intellectual people don't really need to lean on an entity that really doesn't exist. And it does require stepping out and being different.
You know, I've had some very well-known people in the scientific arena call me a religious bigot, not because I am a bigot, but simply because they cannot refute my arguments. I don't claim to have superiority over them, I simply am able to articulate the reasons for my belief and am able to ask them some questions that kind of put them on the hot seat about their relationship.
VICTOR: I like the analogy you use of the 747. For those of our viewers who might not be familiar with that, could you just make that analogy for us?
DR CARSON: Yes. Well, you know, people talk in terms of our universe that there was a big bang and all of a sudden our universe became perfectly formed. And, you know, I ask those-those same people the question, "Well, you also believe in the laws of thermodynamics, right?" And the second law of thermodynamics is entropy, which says that things move toward a state of disorganization. So now you're saying you energize an atmosphere and all of a sudden everything becomes perfectly organized.
And they say, "Well, you know, it may have happened several times, but if it happens enough times over a long enough period of time, then we will get the perfect universe."
And I said, "Well, that's like saying you take a hurricane and you blow it through a junk yard enough times and a perfectly formed 747 will be there at some point ready to fly."
VICTOR: Out of the junk.
DR CARSON: Out of the junk. And I said, "Which of course would be considerably simpler than our entire universe coming into perfect order." And they say, "Yeah, but if you give it enough time that will happen." I would say, "You blow that thing through there as many times as you want, over as long a period of time that you want, there will not be a perfectly formed 747 that comes out of there. Not only that, but when you come out and you see that 747, you will not be saying, 'you know, I'm sure there was a hurricane or something one day that blew through a junk,' you're gonna say, 'somebody created that.'"
Well, that's what I say when I look at this universe and how complex it is.
VICTOR: Talking about risks, you've worked on two of the most celebrated medical cases of conjoined twins being separated. Sometimes you've been successful, sometimes you haven't been. But the two that come to mind are the Iranian Bijani twins and the Zambian Banda twins.
Tell us about that in terms of -- if you could just reflect over those two cases and uh, you know, connect the dots as far as risk is concerned.
DR CARSON: Yeah, well, let me just tackle the Bijani twins.
VICTOR: I want to ask that question again because we might not have an opportunity for re-asks.
You've worked on two of the most celebrated medical cases dealing with the separation of conjoined twins, the Iranian Bijani twins and the Zambian Banda twins. Connect the dots for us, with regard to both of these cases in the light of risk taking.
DR CARSON: Okay, well, you know of course when you're dealing with conjoined twins, joined at the head, there doesn't ever come an occasion when you deal with something more complex than that. But in the case of the Bijani twins, there were some massive social issues involved here.
These were 29-year-old women from Iran, they were joined at the head, and their lifelong dream was to be separated. They had seen multiple experts and no one felt it was feasible. I had been consulted, I didn't think it was feasible, but it turns out that they were going to be able to realize their dream in Singapore. They were going to try to separate them there.
And I felt obligated to go because even though I didn't necessarily agree that this was something that was reasonable to do, I knew they were going to go through with it anyway and I couldn't deny what expertise that I had.
VICTOR: You actually turned down the request to be part of the operation once before.
DR CARSON: Correct. Hoping that maybe that would dissuade them, but they were going to go through with it. And when I met those twins, I must say I finally understood why they were willing to take the risk that they were taking. You know, they were both very well educated. They had learned to speak English in only 7 months. They both had law degrees, even though only one wanted one, and that was part of the conflict because one wanted to be a journalist, one wanted to be a lawyer.
And there was no way they could see their lives working this way. They said one thing to me that really put it in perspective, they said, "Doctor, we would rather die than spend another day together." And that kind of hit me. But then I started thinking about it and I said, "Well, you know, what if you were stuck to somebody, and it could be the person in the world that you like the most, but you could never get away from them for even one second. How long would you like them?"
And I began to realize what they were suffering and where they were coming from and why they were willing to take that kind of risk. And I started thinking about how sometimes people become incarcerated for life, in some remote torture camp and they're willing to take enormous risks to escape. Well, that's exactly the same situation that these young women were in.
They were willing to take virtually any risk in order to escape, from what they considered, an untenable situation. Well, you know, that operation turned out to be very, very complex, took over 50 hours. They did not survive unfortunately, although we did learn a lot of things in that operation. But it taught me a lot about risk and was one of the major impetuses for me writing this book.
VICTOR: Why do you say that? Do you say that because sometimes even when you do take risks and you don't get the results that you expected, you can still learn something from having taken the risks. Is that why you say that?
DR CARSON: Absolutely. You know, when it comes to a failure of any type, it's not as much of a failure if you learn something from it. You know, Thomas Edison said he knew 999 ways a light bulb did not work. I look at one of the operations that we commonly do today, posterior fossa operations, operating on the back part of the brain, the first 13 of those operations done by Walter Dandy at Johns Hopkins, century several decades ago, they all died. He persisted and know that's an operation that we do routinely and very successfully. So, we learn from things and I'm sure that there will come a day when we can very successfully separate conjoined twins without the kinds of mortality and morbidity that we face these days, but it's a learning curve.
VICTOR: What about the Banda twins? What did you learn from that?
DR CARSON: Now, the Banda twins, this was a difficult one for me because I had been in South Africa a few years before that and we were operating on a set of twins that were rapidly deteriorating and it turns out that one had the cardiac function, one had the renal function, so they could not survive together as they grew and they could not survive apart.
After that operation I wasn't really particularly enthusiastic about going back to Africa particularly in a third world setting at a hospital. And yet, a few years later when the call came I had to ask myself, "Are you really to risk, you know, your reputation? Go over there, have two failures in Africa?" And then all of a sudden, you know, it dawned on my, I said, "Wait a minute, this is not about you. Take yourself out of the equation and then do the risk analysis."
And when I took myself out of the equation, it became clear they were asking for my help and they wanted me to lead the team. I said, after praying to God, "I absolutely have to go. I'll look at the things that we learned from the previous surgery." And it turns out the operation took 28 hours, it was extraordinarily complex. We reached one point in the operation where all the vessels were so engorged and entangled it looked impossible.
We stopped. We went into conference. I suggested maybe we could cover the area over with skin, come back in a few months and they would have developed enough collaterals that we could cut through that area. They said, "We can't keep them alive." I went back in there with a prayer on my lips saying, "Lord, it's up to you."
And it was almost like I was in a zone, going through all of those vessels and got 'em all separated, we only lost three units of blood. For an operation like that, it's a miracle in and of itself. And when we finished that operation after 28 hours, one of the twins popped his eyes open and reached up for the endotracheal tube and by the time we got to the ICU the other one did the same thing.
Within two days they were extubated, within three days they were eating, within two weeks they were crawling. And now they're in the 5th grade and they're perfectly fine. And that was really the first time that complexly joined twins had ever, not only survived, but been neurologically intact.
When I sat back and I really thought about that and I said, "Thank you, Lord for helping me to remove myself from the center of the equation and put you in the center."
VICTOR: Dr. Carson, you're a leader in the field of neurosurgery. What connection do you make between leadership on the one hand, and risk taking on the other?
DR CARSON: Yes, well, first of all, in order to be a good leader, you absolutely have to be willing to take risk, because you have to be willing to move into new territory, into unchartered territory. You have to be willing to sometimes not be the most popular person, or at least maybe not in the beginning, but in the end you might be extremely popular, particularly if you're successful.
But unless you're willing to put yourself in that situation, then you can never be a good leader. I think the other thing about good leadership is a willingness to ask questions, because a good leader needs to be able to get input, many times from people that he's leading. And in the book of Proverbs, written by the wisest man who ever lived, he says, "In the multitude of counselors is safety."
And once a leader begins to believe that they're the only one who has the answer, they begin to lose their effectiveness very quickly. But when you begin to be able to integrate a lot of data from a lot of sources, and then to take that and use that to direct yourself, that's real wisdom and I think that's where good leaders come from.
VICTOR: Thank you so much. We're coming to the close of our interview and I have two questions for you here. In your book -- in your new book, "Take the Risk," you spoke earlier about living out your faith being a risk. But I want to flip that question around and ask the question, as a Christian and as a scientist, what is your perspective about taking the risk of never accepting the free gift of salvation that is offered by God through His Son Jesus Christ? Is that a risk?
DR CARSON: Well, you know, if you stop and you say, "I don't know, I'm an agnostic. I don't know whether there's a God or not. But does it really matter?" And then you do a risk analysis and you say, "Well, but what if there is a God and what if He did send His Son to pay the penalties for all of my sins? And what if, by accepting that and aligning myself with Him, I now have an opportunity to have eternal life and peace forever?"
And then you look at the other side and you say, "What if all that's true but I don't accept it? Then what lays in store for me?" And when you consider how easy it is to accept it, versus reject it, and just sit there and do your own BWA on that, and I think if you're wise, you'll come to a very appropriate conclusion.
VICTOR: Which is?
DR CARSON: Which is, it's much easier to accept what He has given us. And, what if He doesn't exist? Then what have you lost? Haven't lost anything. All your endorphin levels have improved because now you're feeling at peace with yourself and you think you've done the right things.
So the worst thing that happens is that, you know, you've gotten this good, jolly feeling for nothing and then you die and that's the end. That's not so bad. But when you look at the upside, which is just absolutely tremendous, that's great. On the other hand, if you look at the downside of if He does exist, that's not very pleasant.
VICTOR: Thanks for helping us put that in perspective. For those who pick up your book, "Take the Risk," which is a fantastic read, I read it in four hours, great read and I'm actually handing it over to my 16-year-old daughter and my 14-year-old son to read because I think they're going to greatly benefit from this. For those who pick up this book, what major lesson would you like them to take away from it?
DR CARSON: The major lesson I want them to take away from it is that the person that has the most to do with what happens to you is you. And what you need to do is use the enormous brain that God has given you to sort out the pathway, in terms of what you will and will not do and how you will accomplish it.
That cannot be done without risk, however, you need to be able to decipher those risks by asking yourself some basic questions. And I guarantee you, if you will do that, you will make the right choices.
VICTOR: Dr. Ben Carson, thank you so much for joining us.
DR CARSON: Thank you for having me.
