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- This week on "The A List," I'll learn how one mother's early influence set her children on the path to excellence.

- She just always had that intense desire to be able to read and to gain knowledge because somehow deep in herself, she knew that that was the answer.

And she had so little in the way of opportunities and had to work as a domestic.

But she was really aspiring.

And she would say, "How come these people live "in these beautiful homes like this?"

And she concluded that it was because they read a lot of books and they didn't watch a lot of TV.

(Ben laughing) - Join me as I sit down with Dr. Ben Carson coming up next on "The A List."

(bright upbeat music) Dr. Ben Carson is an author, politician and retired neurosurgeon.

With an impressive career spanning four decades, he has worked tirelessly to serve his country and its people.

Whether it's from the operating room, or the United States government.

A seasoned public figure, Dr. Carson has made headlines throughout his career.

From revolutionary surgeries, to a bid for the United States presidency, to serving as secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

He is also a dedicated advocate for education.

And in 1994, he co-founded the Carson Scholars Fund with his wife, Candy.

And that is exactly what brought him right here to Chattanooga.

Well, Dr. Carson, welcome to "The A List."

- Thank you, nice to be with you - And welcome to Chattanooga.

And we're thrilled that you're here.

And I know what brings you to Tennessee, partly, is because of Carson Scholars.

- Absolutely.

- And we're thrilled that you'll be opening up a reading room in Fort Oglethorpe at Battlefield Elementary.

Tell us a little bit about that and congratulations, I know you and your wife, Candy are celebrating or just celebrated last year, 25 years- - Yes.

- Of the scholars program.

Tell me a little bit about what that has been doing.

- And the 10,000 scholars.

- Unbelievable.

- We're doing that.

Well, it really started because I would go into these schools and I would see all these trophies.

All-State basketball, State Wrestling, All-State, this, that, and the other.

But what about the academic superstars?

What did they get?

Maybe a National Honors Society pen and a pat on the head.

They're their little nerd.

Nobody really cared that much about them.

And yet these are the people who potentially will be leading our nation.

And we wanted to really encourage them.

So we started giving out awards for them, which included money.

They get to go to a banquet, the school gets a big trophy that goes out with all the sports trophies, with their name on it.

And we kind of make them into a big deal in their school.

And then the Reading Room Program is one in which we put primarily in Title 1 schools, where a lot of kids come from homes with few books.

They go to a school with probably a limited budget for books and libraries, and they have just a large selection of books that would really appeal to children.

And they can go in and sort of pick the books that they like.

And if you can get them really interested in reading, it's really changed the trajectory of their life that says, if a child is reading a great level by grade three, their likelihood of graduating from high school massively increases.

And that's so important because education, I think is the great equalizer.

It really doesn't matter what socio-economic background you came from.

If you get a good education, you get to write your own ticket.

And certainly that was the case with me.

That was the case with my brother.

Even though my mother got so much criticism.

"You can't make boys stay in the house reading books, "they'll grow up and they'll hate you."

And I would overhear her friends, and I say, "You know they're right, mother.

"ú (all laughing) But it didn't matter, we still had to do it.

And what a difference it made for me, we were desperately poor but between the covers of those books, I could go anywhere, I could be anybody, I could do anything.

And my horizons began to vastly expand.

And the other thing about my mother is she never made excuses.

She never accepted excuses either.

She grew up right here in Chattanooga.

Very large rural family, got married at age 13, trying to escape dire poverty.

They moved to Detroit.

Years later she discovered that her husband was a bigamist.

And of course, that led to a divorce and she had to try to take care of us by herself.

But anytime an excuse came out of our mouth, the next thing outta her mouth was a point called, "Yourself to blame."

And the next question was, "Do you have a brain?"

And if the answer was, yes, then you could have thought your way out of it.

Or it really doesn't matter what John or Susan or Mary or Bob did or said.

And when you grow up with that mindset, you tend to be solution-oriented.

And that's what we also want to inspire our scholars.

- Well, I'd love to talk more about your upbringing.

I know your parents are from Chattanooga and then you were raised in Detroit, and you talk often about your mother's influence, not just on your success, but on your dedication to education and on your love of literature.

I know she also limited you and your brother to two television shows a week, and then you had to do two book reports a week.

My first question is, what two shows did you pick to watch?

- Well, my favorite show was "GE College Bowl."

You're much too young to know about that show, but it came on every Sunday at six o'clock and they pitted two colleges against each other, four contestants on each college.

And they would ask questions about science and math and history and geography.

And I was really good at all that stuff.

So I was gung-ho, I was gonna be on "College Bowl."

But they also asked about classical art and classical music.

There was no way you were learning that at Southwestern High School at Inner City Detroit.

So I took it upon myself to learn about classical arts.

I would go downtown to the Detroit Institute of Arts, roam to those galleries until I knew every picture, who painted it, when they were born, what period it represented, always listening to my portable radio, bought Telamon, Mozart, kids in Detroit thought I was nuts.

A black kid in Motown listening to Mozart.

I tried to convince them that the Mo in Motown was Mozart, but nobody was buying that.

But I even decided which college to attend based on that program 'cause I had enough money to apply to one college.

And I said, I'm gonna apply to the college that wins the grand championship of "College Bowl."

And that year the grand championship was between Harvard and Yale.

And Yale demolished Harvard so I didn't want to go to school with a bunch of dummies, so I applied to Yale.

(all laughing) And fortunately they accepted me with a scholarship.

And the best thing about going to Yale of course, was that I met my wife there, who was also a Detroiter.

But we had to go off to New Haven and meet each other.

- And also is committed to the arts.

She is a Musician.

- Absolutely, very much so.

- When you and your brother were diligently reading and writing those book reports, at what point did it dawn on you or did it ever that your mother didn't actually have the background to be able to read them?

- When we were in high school.

Interestingly enough, she did teach herself to read.

She got her GED.

She went on to college.

And in 1994, she got an honorary doctorate degree.

So she was Dr. Carson too.

(all laughing) But she just always had that intense desire to be able to read and to gain knowledge because somehow deep in herself she knew that that was the answer.

And she had had so little on the way of opportunities and had to work as a domestic that she was really a spy 'cause she was saying, "How come these people live "in these beautiful homes like these?"

And she concluded that it was because they read a lot of books and they didn't watch a lot of TV.

(Ben laughing) - It's clear that the value his mother placed on reading and education made a big impact on young Ben.

After graduating from Yale, he went on to receive his medical degree from the University of Michigan.

And completed his residency at Johns Hopkins University.

It was at Johns Hopkins that he became the youngest director of pediatric neurosurgery in the hospital's history.

And further set himself apart by performing several landmark operations throughout his nearly 30 year tenure in that role.

But as a kid growing up in Detroit, his dream of becoming a doctor seemed far from certain.

What sparked in you the desire to go into medicine?

And this also comes from a (indistinct), I want people to understand, it wasn't like from the start you were this dedicated student and a Carson Scholar by nature.

- Far from it.

- It was something that really it feels like an evolution into that world.

But what was that first spark for you?

- I think it was the mission stories that I used to hear in church and Sunday school.

They frequently featured missionary doctors who seemed like the most noble people on the face of the earth traveling all over the world, had great personal peril and sacrifice to bring not only physical but mental and spiritual healing to people.

And I said when I was eight years old I'm gonna be a missionary doctor.

Now it changed over the years to psychiatrist, cardiothoracic surgeon.

But when I was in medical school, the lectures by the neurosurgeons just captivated me, the things that they were able to do I just was blown away by it.

And I started migrating in that direction.

And a lot of people said, "That's the wrong area for you."

At that time there had only been eight black neurosurgeons in the world.

But the good Lord does not dispense talent on the basis of race.

And I took to neurosurgery like a duck to water it just seemed so natural for me.

- So you get out of University of Michigan Medical School, you go to Hopkins and then you decide to go to Australia.

What made you move halfway around the world to continue your studies?

- That's a very good question.

When I was chief resident, we had the grand opening of the new Neuroscience Center at Johns Hopkins.

And since Hopkins is like the modern birthplace of neurosurgery, all the big wigs from around the world were there, including Bryant Stokes from Australia.

And he took a liking to me and he was saying, "You should come to Australia and be the senior registrar "at our major teaching hospital in Western Australia."

And I said, "Australia, you gotta be kidding me."

I didn't say that out loud, but that's what I was thinking.

You drill a hole from Baltimore, you come out in Australia.

I was, plus I had heard that they had a whites-only policy.

So I kind of dismissed the idea.

But every time I turned around, there was someone saying, "Good day, mate."

I just kept running into Australians everywhere and they seemed like nice people.

And every time we would turn a TV on, there was a special about Australia.

And I said to Candy, I think the Lord wants us to go to Australia.

And she started doing some research, she discovered they did have a whites-only policy, but it had been officially abolished in 1968.

And that was 1983.

So we sold all of our earthly belongings and off we went to Australia.

And our friends were saying, "You'll be back in three weeks."

But little did they know we didn't have any more money so we couldn't come back.

(Ben laughing) But there were only four neurosurgical consultants in all of Western Australia.

And once they discovered that I was pretty good with my hands in the operating room, they kind of left me in charge of the major teaching hospital and they went out to the private hospitals.

- Wow.

- And I got so much experience doing really big cases.

And if I had stayed on at Hopkins, I would've been the low man on the boat totem pole, got to do what nobody else wanted to do.

Here I was doing crème de la crème, complex cases.

So when I returned to Hopkins a year later, and the position opened up for a director of pediatric neurosurgeon, normally, they would go out and get somebody with a big name and a lot of gray hair.

But they said, "Well, Carson's very young but he can do everything."

So, boom, there I was at a very young age.

It all worked out extremely well.

- And I think what so many people remember you first for is the really remarkable pioneering surgery of the Binder twins.

- Yes.

- Who were conjoined twins, the back of the head and the first separation.

- In which they both survived.

And it was a very unusual situation to be able to do that because the place where they were joined is the place where all the draining vessels come.

And that's why it's never worked before because they would bleed to death when people try to do things.

And I was talking to one of my colleagues who was a cardiothoracic surgeon and I said, "How come you can operate in little baby hearts "and they don't bleed to death?"

And he started telling me about hypothermic arrest where you cool the body temperature until the heart stops, pump all the blood out.

And then in a small child, you have up to an hour that you can operate and then you have to pump the blood back in, warm it up and start the heart back out.

And I was saying, when we got to that critical part in the separation, you could use that technique and maybe they wouldn't bleed to death.

And then I said, "Why am I thinking about that?

"I'm never gonna see a set of Siamese twins anyway, "why am I thinking about that?"

Within a couple of months, there they were.

And the question was being asked, "Is there something you can do?"

Because by that time I had already done a couple of very unusual things.

So people were starting to think, maybe you could do it.

And I already sort of had the plan hatched and started talking about it and I was very fortunate to be at a place like Johns Hopkins that has so many world class experts at everything.

And so they helped put together a really, really good plan and I had a lot of help and everybody played a big role.

- The incredible case of the Binder twins ended up being one of many remarkable milestones in Dr. Carson's medical career.

In the midst of such a demanding workload, he also managed to find the time to become a celebrated author.

In fact, his autobiography, "Gifted hands," was adapted for the screen in a film starring, Cuba Gooding Jr.

It's clear that the early directive from his mother to value education and strive for excellence led Dr. Carson to achieve some extraordinary things.

But in 2015, he set out to take on his biggest role yet.

Dr. Carson, when I think about the trajectory of your life, I think a lot about my own faith.

I'm just raised Jewish and during Passover, during our Seder, there's a song we sing called "Dayenu."

And a lot of people translated as, it's enough.

But actually what it translates to is, it would've been enough, right?

It would've been a blessing enough.

And when I think about everything you've accomplished, every point in your life we could have said, "Dayenu."

That would've been enough to be the youngest director of pediatric neurology, to have been an award-winning author, to have had a movie written about your life.

But no, it was not enough, because at some point you take what might have been the greatest leap in your life and decide to run for president of the United States.

What conversation ensued between you and Candy, between you and your boys, when you sat down and contemplated that life changing decision?

- Well, we talked about it.

And first of all, I didn't wanna run for president.

But after the National Prayer Breakfast speech everybody was saying, you gotta run for president.

And I said, "You people are crazy, "what are they talking about?"

And I said, if I just ignore 'em, they will go away.

But they didn't go away.

Every place I went, there were people with run Ben run signs and placards, had over 500,000 petitions in my office.

I could barely get in there with all the boxes of petitions.

And Candy and I talked about the fact that our lives had already changed and now they're gonna change even more.

And should I do it or should I not do it?

And we started talking about our kids and potential grandchildren and what kind of country would they grow up in if we didn't speak up about what we believed in.

And even at that time, you could see how things were starting to shift, and how some of our freedoms that have characterized America were starting to be compromised, and I was very concerned about it.

So that was what really convinced us that it would be something worth doing.

- Once you were in the middle of it, were there regrets at all?

- No, it was interesting, when I reached front runner status and there were 300 cameras following you every place you went.

And of course I had a full secret service detail so you really didn't have any privacy.

But I was not regretful when I dropped out, I was actually kind of relieved.

And it's not that I don't still want to do a lot to try to help our country.

And that's what I'm doing now with Carson Scholars Fund and with American Cornerstone and with the other things that we do and the books that are written.

But I just really didn't particularly wanna be in that situation.

- It worked out well.

- It worked out well.

- But then of course, because there's always a twist in your story, you become the secretary for Housing and Urban Development.

And if we only looked at headlines, how does that kid from Detroit who becomes the youngest head of neurosurgery, then become the HUD secretary?

What were those years like for you?

- Well, they were pretty amazing.

First of all, in the beginning, I did not have a deputy secretary for eight months.

I didn't have any assistant secretaries for five months.

So every day was like drinking from a fire hydrant.

But eventually we got who we needed and we assembled an incredible team.

But the financial underpinnings of HUD were horrible.

And I remember all those stories I used to hear about fiscal irresponsibility at HUD and all the billions of dollars that were being squandered.

We had to get a handle on that.

So once we got things straightened out fiscally, we were able to get a lot of things done, a lot of programs because now we didn't have to worry about where every penny was.

We developed a dashboard to give us real time information about where the money was, how it was being used, what renewals need to be done If somebody had missed a renewal date, automatically triggered all kinds of amazing things.

And then we were able to get programs done quickly like a bunch of kids came to us from Ohio, who had aged outta foster care.

And they told us about the 20,000 kids who aged outta foster care each year.

And how so many of them end up homeless or in horrible situations.

And we were able to put together the FYI Program, Foster Youth to Independence program in four months.

Within four months, we were actually giving out grants, giving them a place to live, and wrap around services that are needed for them to flourish.

So it was a good thing.

It worked out very well.

- So I dare say, you will never retire, right?

There's so many parts of your life where- - I've given up.

- You've suggested right.

And may be the only thing you fail there, is retirement.

- I figure I'll retire when I get to heaven.

(all laughing) - So with that in mind, what's the goal for the next phase and stage of your life?

I know you've just started a podcast, you're on a virtual and hopefully in-person book tour, you and your wife are champions, of course, for education and you continue with Carson Scholars.

With this, how do you gauge success?

What do you hope your voice will create in the world?

- I hope we can save our country.

I'm a student of history and I have seen what happens when a lot of the things that are going on in our country now are allowed to flourish.

And we gotta stop it.

And we gotta get the American people to realize that we're not each other's enemies.

And we can't let the purveyors of hatred and division prevail.

And that requires a vigorous opposition utilizing a multitude of devices and methods.

So the rest of my life would be occupied with using those devices to stop that erosion.

America is a gift to the world.

And before America became a great power, there were all these despotic leaders trampling on anybody who was weaker than they were.

And once we became a superpower that subsided to a great degree.

As we're losing power, the desperts are starting to reappear and we've gotta stop it.

It's not only essential for America, it's essential for the world.

- And on a personal level, I know you have three boys.

What do you hope they tell their children about their dad?

- I hope they tell 'em that he was a God fearing man who loved his country.

- Thank you for joining us, Dr. Carson.

- Absolutely.

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- [Male advertiser] Chattanooga Funeral Home Crematory & Florist, dedicated to helping you celebrate your life or the life of a loved one for over 85 years.

Chattanooga Funeral Home believes that each funeral should be as unique and memorable as the life being honored.

- [Female advertiser] This program is also made possible by support from viewers like you, thank you.