America used to be the shiny City on the hill and now it’s declining rather rapidly I was in Europe last year talking to a number of people and I said what do you think about America and the answer I got was we think you’ve lost your minds Dr Ben Carson is a renowned neurosurgeon former US presidential candidate and author of most recently the perilous fight overcoming our cultures war on the American family family is where you derive your identity with the breakup of the black family you see the the violence that has ensued the murder rates in our inner cities are so high people don’t respect other people’s lives a lot of that has to do with the missing fathers now that spread to the rest of our society as well this is American thought leaders and I’m Yan Kell Dr Ben Carson such a pleasure to have you back on American thought leaders it’s wonderful to be with you I always enjoy being with people who are logical logical I I I’m lucky I’m lucky to to to be logical I guess I was just talking with a friend I said that we were going to be interviewing and he mentioned to me that when you were doing your surgery on the conjoin twins at at the head it was a 31-hour surgery um H how how does one how does a person do that well you know it’s sort of like being in the jungle with a hungry tiger uh you’re not going to go to sleep uh you’re not going to relax until you get out of it and the time actually goes by very quickly because you’re so intent in what you’re doing so uh but I remember the the first set of conjoined twins uh after the operation I was sitting in my office talking to one of the other surgeons and we both fell asleep in mids sentence and woke up 3 hours later we’re so tired you’re literally running on adrenaline uh no question about it and you know you’re praying for wisdom you’re just hoping that you will be able to figure things out as you go whenever you’re in Uncharted Territory but you have a sense of what needs to be done and we have much more advantages now than they did in olden days because of the Imaging the imaging has advanced enormously and now that we’re able to couple that Imaging with uh things like Ai and Robotics uh it’s going to greatly reduce the complications in complex surgery is this is this a common much more common surgery now uh it’s it’s still vanishingly rare but uh the techniques that have evolved uh to deal with it uh certainly make it uh less complex than it was before you mentioned prayer yes that that was an important part of what you did now that’s that’s interesting because I I don’t think everybody would say that and certainly a lot not a lot of people in the scientific realm uh some of them sort of denigrate prayer and people who pray but the fact of the matter is the way I look at it when you look at the complexity of the human brain for instance it is extremely complex and the way it’s put together and even if you believe in natural selection which are you know the things that work stay and the things that don’t work disappear you’d have to have so many consecutive things that worked Millions without a reversal it’s just not practical and the way they solve that dilemma is they say well if you have enough time billions and billions of years you know at some point you will get the sequences that are necessary in order to create life but that’s like saying if you blow a tornado through a junkyard enough times over a long long period of time time at the end of one of those tornadoes will be a 747 that’s ready to fly I just don’t think that’s possible I I don’t want to necessarily dig it this is this is a bit different than our topic we’re going to be talking about the importance of fathers as it’s you know we’re in around Father’s Day right now we’re going to be talking about but but faith is very important back in the day when I was studying evolutionary biology um what what occurred to me by about third year okay in undergrad was just that a lot of people religiously in a way believed that natural selection was the way that it all happened from the very beginning this was uh reinforced by professors I took I was interested in alternate models of evolution right because it was clear to me by that time reinforced by a number of some I think some of the best professors in this field actually uh that that obviously it’s not the whole story right right if if it’s part maybe it’s part of but it’s what the strange thing to me was there was this kind of kind of Faith among some people who clearly actually didn’t understand how it worked because I was learning you know how what how the theory worked and everything but but they nonetheless believed that it had to be that way well there have been a lot of strong arguments in both directions I was once engaged in a public argument about uh Faith uh in God in the scientific Arena and there was a famous atheist on the other side and at the end I said you win the debate because you’ve convinced me that you came from a monkey and I came from God well no but so so a proper you know the proper evolutionary biologist will say well no Dr Carson it’s not a monkey it’s a it’s a common ancestor right that is incredibly amusing let let let’s go back let’s let’s let’s dial back the issue at hand a little bit more overcoming our cultures war on the American family you know the perilous fight I’ve been learning about this over the last five years from multiple angles then that the idea is simple if you grow up in a new and what you think of as the traditional nuclear family statistically you are set for Success no question about it both the conservative think tanks and the liberal think tanks they both come to that conclusion you know children raised in that environment do better academically do better career rise have less incidents of alcoholism uh teen pregnancy uh mental disturbances uh I mean you’re clicking on all cylinders so there’s really no controversy about that the question is what do we do with that information you know do we enact policies that promote traditional nuclear families or do we try to denigrate them the latter approach seems to be the one that Hollywood has taken you can’t look at any series these days uh and get very far into it before the alternative to the traditional family is presented not only as acceptable but probably as preferable so there is a reluctance to form those traditional relations ships people are not getting married or they’re getting married much later uh that’s having an impact on our population uh the babies per woman now is down to 1.6 it requires 2.1 just for maintenance and of course uh some of the left say that’s the reason that we should open our borders and let everybody in but uh you know we we have got to have a more orderly process to not be at 2.1 or above as you say for maintenance just to kind of keep the population it it it feels almost nihilistic it’s like we don’t believe in ourselves enough to replicate the population or something right well what we don’t do is we don’t think into the future we just think about now I want this now this is what works for me now I mean you think about all the dinks uh double income no k kids that’s sort of like the new American dream uh sure you got more money to Lavish on yourselves but what happens when you’re 85 years old and what happens to your family uh who’s around who really cares about you all those are important questions that sometimes people realize that when it’s too late so I wanted to take a quick break to tell you about something that’s actually quite important to me I’ve been kind of resisting uh getting a sponsor for the show for some time there’s been numerous offers let’s just say Patriot Gold group came to me and that gold is actually something that I’ve been thinking about quite a bit because we’re in very volatile times very unpredictable times so gold is the place that that I think is a one of the few kind of stable places to put money uh and Patriot Gold group is a good company we checked out and so I bought some gold with them and you know the value and this is kind of crazy uh since I bought it I think about 3 weeks ago of this gold has gone up by over $500 and this isn’t a large amount of gold that I bought here so let me show you what I got so this is Rand Refinery 1 o fine gold bullion the American Eagle and five silver eagles so I’m going to I’m actually going to pull out the Gold Eagle for you because it looks kind kind of awesome wow it’s got an amazing weight to it so if you’re inspired to buy some gold I recommend you call Patriot Gold group you can call them at 888 85749 888 85749 mention American thought Leaders with that let’s head back to the interview I recently had an episode where we talked about uh Yuri bezmenov’s uh interviews back in the day and he was you know KGB Defector that explained the Soviet de uh vision for demoralization of America mhm right it’s like how to how to foster a society that doesn’t believe in itself right it feels to me like this is a a very bipartisan thing this lack of belief in ourselves as a society well those who want to fundamentally changes in partic into a Marxist or communist country they don’t care whether you’re a Democrat or Republican they just want to manipulate you as it says in the book uh in the Congressional Record January 10th 1963 when Congressman Herlong of Florida read in the 45 goals of Communism in America uh it’s it’s pretty touching because you can see all of it happening now and that was over 60 years ago uh infiltrate the public school syst system and teacher unions so that you can indoctrinate the kids um infiltrate the news media and Hollywood so that you can uh basically manipulate the population uh Drive wedges between parents and children uh denigrate the status of the family um make sexual perversion normal natural and healthy I mean write down the line you look and say check check check M America used to be the shiny City on the hill and now it’s declining rather rapidly I was in Europe last year talking to uh a number of people and I said what do you think about America and the answer I got was we think you’ve lost your minds and that was very concerning to them because if America goes what happens to everybody else you know I I also recently had someone on the show we were talking about this this exact you know term I think this is from Ronald Reagan or earlier The Shining City on the hill compared to many places in the world today with this decline that you’re describing and all of that all the problems her argument was actually America Remains The Shining City on the hill because it’s Americans sure that make America and and there’s a ton of them that are here for that particular sense of freedom and opportunity that relatively speaking still exists and that the the reason why you have so many people you know taking advantage of the the the you know opportunity to come through the southern border right is because they’re looking for opportunity no no question but if you’re stuck in the desert and a jalape comes by that you can get on and get out of the desert you’ll take it it doesn’t have to be the Rolls-Royce but if you can have the Rolls-Royce which we used to have why not take it why not cultivate that so there’s no question that we have deteriorated and that we’re going downhill but we’re still a heck of a lot better than most other places if you were born in this country you hit the lottery already and that’s one of the reasons that that we should study what were those things that made us into a great nation and we should not be throwing those things away and thinking that we’re just always going to be a great nation it doesn’t work that way and uh you know you look at the cycle of uh prosperity and despair in Nations historically and and uh we’re sort of near the end of that cycle uh and we don’t want to be near the end of the cycle and why can’t we learned from what people have done before why do we have to go down the same pathway uh you know our Founders they studied every government that ever existed in the world and one of the things that became clear to them is that all governments tend to move in the same direction doesn’t matter how lofty their goals are in the beginning they move toward growth infiltration and domination it doesn’t mean that they’re bad people it means that that’s just what they do a lion’s not a bad animal because it kills gazals and eat them that’s what Lions do and they work very hard to give us a system that would not lead to that end but they knew it was going to be difficult and that’s why Ben Franklin said when he came out of that building he was asked whether we have here monarchy or Republic said Republic if you can keep it and uh it’s difficult I mean we’re as close to losing it right now as we have ever been when we can have a department of justice that is blatant in their bias and the way they treat different groups of people and uh you know when you have elections that are questioned by half of the society and you don’t make any attempt to make it transparent uh those are the seeds that grow into the kind of discontent that cause very bad things to happen in countries historically so I let me see if I got this right you said with governments they I think he said there’s growth and there’s infiltration and there’s domination I’m kind of imagining you know bureaucracy as part of that but can you I didn’t fully understand how that works can you explain that well the way our country was designed the government was there for some pretty specific things you know the pro protection of the people to Pro provide some basic uh Necessities for a functional Society but they weren’t to be involved in the daytoday running of your life that was supposed to be up to you and uh you know when dville came to study our nation he was very impressed with the environment that Foster Innovation and entrepreneurialship that environment is severely affected in a NE negative way when you have government Bud into everything uh a good example would be the government’s desire to have everybody Drive electric vehicles without having the infrastructure that’s necessary without having figured out what are you going to do with all those dead batteries uh what is that going to do to the environment just this is what you need to do the thing that made us great in the industrial area is that we let Market forces determine what was going to survive and what was going to thrive and what was going to be def defeated when people are incentivized to do well uh monetarily they’re not going to work hard to establish those things if there’s no benefit to themselves and their family you know I want to talk about uh this Innovation obviously you know you were quite the innovator back in the day in the field of medicine and the um you know I guess neurology neur neur surgery yeah and something we’ve been think about a lot in the last few years is medical schools the Dei uh philosophy that has invaded some of the medical schools is of some concern uh because one of the medical schools in California who adopted that early on have a situation where a large number of their people are unable to pass the national uh exams National Medical Board exams and is that the person that you want to operate on you or your child you know there’s a certain body of of knowledge that is absolutely critical to do the job appropriately you don’t want a pilot who knows 90% of what needs to be done but you know that just doesn’t work and that doesn’t work uh if you need to have complex surgery done we have been in the past a meritocracy mhm and there’s no question that certain segments of our society in the past did not have exposure uh to the kind of education that would allow you to excel in certain areas that has largely uh been corrected it’s not 100% I was a first year medical student you know I did poorly on the first set of comprehensive exams my counselor told me to drop out of medical school said you’re not cut out for medicine and you’re just going to hurt yourself and other people there was definitely no Dei there but uh you know I prayed for wisdom and I just started thinking I say what kind of courses have you always done very well in I realize I did really well in courses where I did a lot of reading and what kind of courses have you struggled in I struggled in courses where I listen to a lot of boring lectures because I don’t get anything out of boring lectures that’s not the way it is for some people get a lot out of them I got nothing out of them and I was wasting six hours a day so I made the executive decision to spend that six hours a day reading and the rest of medical school was a snap after that different people learn in different ways and some of the medical schools have discovered that but you know several years later when I was back at my medical school as was the commencement speaker I was looking for that counselor because I was going to tell me wouldn’t cut out to be a counselor right well and you know what’s so interesting is I’m I think I’m I’m actually the opposite I learn through listening much better than I do from reading and I so I’ve been taking advantage of these technologies that that actually will read things to you I find I can ingest the written word faster and more effectively that way so it’s but it’s curious it’s different for different people right yeah you know some people are very uh visual in their learning and uh you know I’m I’m I’m visual too and uh so I learned to take everything that I needed to know for a test and put it on a flash card and I would carry these flashcards around in my pocket my second year in medical school I was living with my brother who was in the School of Engineering and he even knew all the bacteria and what they were sensitive to because I always had these cards the point is that you somehow you know knew enough about yourself that this is something you could do right and so I I’ve been thinking about this whole realm of demoralization right on the one hand you know societally we don’t believe in ourselves enough I I want to talk about that more but you know some of these efforts like Dei and so forth or in theory right to help people you know just give give him a little bit of an extra push if they couldn’t if they you know for example if they had if the general approach was the like this counselor right then you a lot of people might not have said okay I’m going to figure this out they might have said well I guess I guess he’s right right right right I mean you’ve certainly in this book you’ve certainly write quite a lot about race um and and you know there’s certainly in American history there was a Viewpoint in the past where well you know you know black Americans guess they’re not cut out for for certain things you obviously you know we Pro very very clearly the opposite but but what has there been a place for this in our society yes uh there was a time when people didn’t believe uh for instance that a a black person could be a nuclear physicist or any number of things an airplane pilot um obviously No One Believes that anymore uh and there had to be a time when that door was busted down because it was isn’t going to be opened voluntarily but uh that was decades ago and you know what needs to be proven has been proven so you know the only people who think that way now are Neanderthals and there aren’t a whole lot of them left around so that takes care of itself and you know you look at the progress that’s been made just in my lifetime you now I remember when I was six going down to Tennessee and there were all these whites only and colors only signs and you know people explain to me what it means and why you need to pay attention um in that same lifetime the same lifetime you have black generals and Admirals and CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and heads of Foundations and University presidents we’ve had a black president of United States I mean to say that it’s the same in the same lifetime is craziness we’ve made enormous progress and continue to make progress to this very time what can we do to believe in ourselves more well you know John Adams our second president famously said our constitution was designed for a moral and religious people and is fully inadequate for the government of any other I think what we can do is get back to Our Roots now our founding document the Declaration of Independence says that our rights come from our creator now not from government and we need to get back to the belief system that took us from a rag tag bunch of mishan to the Pinnacle of the world in record time it was the things that we believed uh our judeo Christian values they taught us to love your neighbor not to cancel your neighbor if they have a different yard sign uh in Prior time stimes if it was Harvest Time and one of your neighbors broke his leg everybody else harvested his crops no questions asked they didn’t want to know what his religion was or what his political affiliation was they said this is my neighbor and they need my help that was the kind of thing that made America into a very strong Nation MH that’s what we need to get back instead of um allowing ourselves to be manipulated on the basis of race age income gender religion political affiliation we allow wedges to be driven in and it’s destroying our society but here’s a bigger picture and I talk about this in the book um the United States of America stands in the way of worldwide Marxism and we cannot be overcome militarily therefore you need to destroy us from within and that’s why all this effort is focused on the basic element of our foundation which are our families you destroy that you destroy the passing on of values when you don’t have values passed on you’re sort of like uh what we’re seeing on some of these college campuses because they don’t know history which gives you your identity upon which your beliefs are based so if you don’t know those things you’re like a leaf blowing in the wind whatever the the social Breeze is that’s coming along you get caught up in it having no idea what you’re talking about and these students have no ideal that Hamas who they’re advocating for would no sooner cut their head off then turn the light on you know there’s this multi-prong you know as you describe assault on the family I just want to kind of lay out where are these where are the pressure points because you know we obviously there are families right and and this it’s I it’s something that strikes me and I’ve been uh you know watching communist China for a very long long time and they were probably the most effective of any group at you know having the cultural revolution where the vestiges of the old are eliminated right not everything military strategy they chose not to eliminate that something I’ve talked about on episodes but but the family um it people still gravitate to the family unit very much in China you know even if they limit the number of children they’ve limited the number of children created problems there I mean that that’s interesting because of course they were interested in right breaking that well the family is where you derive your identity and um you know we’ve we’ve already had the example with the breakup of the black family and you see the the violence uh that has ensued uh the murder rates uh in our inner cities are so high people don’t respect other people’s lives a lot of that has to do with the missing fathers and now that spread to the rest of our society is well why was the black family particularly either susceptible or was it targeted or how did that happen well you know the black family did very well throughout slavery and right Jim Crow and all those the family were together at that point and then Along Came Lynden Johnson and the war on poverty and uh policies that did not Foster Family development uh and if you were getting some aid for instance for living expenses and you got a raise your rent went up you brought someone into the home who had another income your rent went up uh there were other things that sort of pushed the man out of the family the more babies you had out of wedlock the more money you got you know these are crazy policies they were I mean clearly they weren’t designed to work like that or you know well I don’t know I don’t I I wonder because uh Lyndon Johnson was caught on tape saying you know if we give these black people these things we’ll have their vote for the next 200 years uh you know it was all politically driven it wasn’t because they were compassionate individuals uh but the bottom line is it caused dysfunction families to develop where there had been very strong families before and you see the result of that and now that same phenomenon has spread to the rest of our society and therefore we’re seeing a very rapid disintegration of traditional nuclear families MH and a concominant decline in our nation well so you know we we’ve talked before about um you know characteristics of uh of I guess large families really right I mean I’m just I’m actually just reading a book called Hannah’s children where a woman uh you know went out and just tried to understand what are the characteristics of the people have chosen to have large family so but tell tell me about that a little bit it’s there seems this seems to be a phenomenon there there’s kind at least at least to me it seems like people are becoming more interested in this again is this is this right is it well I I I hope it’s right uh I haven’t seen too much of it yet but every time I encounter somebody who has more than two children I congratulate them and thank them for what they’re doing for our society U because it’s it’s it’s vitally important the other thing that seems to really be proliferating the uh christian-based schools private schools MH the homeschool groups uh growing at a terrific rate since 2020 uh the number of homeschoolers has doubled and uh it’s still accelerating and the private schools particularly the faith-based private schools have very long waiting lists people trying to get in because they they realize what’s going on in our schools and the things that are being taught there uh which are not conducive to traditional American values and they denigrate traditional American values and say that you know that’s elitist or that’s you know some kind of ism they put on it you have people on the left who seiz upon on the bad and ugly and just emphasize that particularly in the school in the training curricul s and uh so you you get a whole generation of young people who don’t like our country who think that we are the source of all evil who can easily be recruited uh to do things that are harmful to us this is a problem you know Vladimir lenon said give me your children to teach for four years and the seed that I S will never be uprooted they understand how important it is to get there early on that’s why at American Cornerstone Institute we instituted the little patriots program learning program internet based completely free of charge but teaches our children K through five uh what the values were that established this country we have to be there early on during the formative years and the marxists understand this very well and they’ve taken tremendous advantage of it and we’re seeing the result of what they’re doing in our schools Co was a great blessing to us in the sense that it opened our eyes to what was happening in our schools and uh we are responding I don’t think it’s too late one of one of the Silver Linings I suppose of of of the whole Co situation I I I I’m aware and I I haven’t seen statistics on this but I have a sense that there’s a lot of people interested in these faith base schools that you said there’s big lineups for that aren’t particularly religious themselves oh yes absolutely I was talking to to the Head master of one of the schools just this week and they said there are a lot of people who don’t come from the Christian background but they recognize the value of traditional uh education because you know these schools don’t spend all their time talking about the Bible uh they teach reading writing and arithmetic uh and physics well and it there’s this sort of Maxim right like learning how to think versus what to think right and that’s interesting because you know the the um I know rhetoric or something right is that you know of course in the religious school that’s where you’re being indoctrinated right that’s where you’re being told what to think how and as how you’re supposed to think think about the world as opposed to you know what we call critical thinking or you know being able to kind of you know figure things out for yourself based on logic right based on I mean and ask questions right ask the right questions you know uh in 19 58 there was a man named Edward leis shrimp M who started a la against one of the counties in Pennsylvania because at the beginning of the school day they requireed the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer and a Bible reading and uh you know the school district and even the state said all a parent has to do is send a note asking that their child be Exempted from that if they don’t want that to happen but that wasn’t good enough and it ended up in the Supreme Court in 1963 at which time they ruled that it was unconstitutional uh to have mandatory prayer or Bible reading uh but then it continued to morph from there to there can be no support whatsoever for anything that’s religious uh in the public setting now think about how illogical that is in a country whose founding document says that our rights come from our creator whose Pledge of Allegiance says we’re one nation under God uh whose coins and dollars say in God we trust that makes no sense whatsoever and that was obviously never the intent of the of the founders that we completely separate God and religion from everything there intention was that the church would not rule the state and the state would not rule the church well it and it made a ton of sense because they were actually from competing religious groups right so they were they wanted to make sure that no one religious group would become the dominant and impose itself right this is what that was happening that was happening in the 13 colonies you know you had people who said no Catholics here or none of this group here prends I mean it was a mess and so it it was done for the right purposes but it’s morphed into something that uh was never the intent but the the the challenge is is how do you make a society work you have to have the rule of law uh and if if your diverse culture does not fit into the rule of law of the society it has to go uh because you can’t accommodate things that are at opposite ends of spectrums you know some of the Sharia policies for instance and particularly the way that they treat women that’s not compatible with our system that’s not compatible with our our culture or our laws and I don’t think that we should change our culture and laws in order to accommodate that if that’s what you believe then you should go somewhere where they believe that you know it’s even one thing if you you know believe it you know yourself and your unit but it’s another thing if you kind of demanding that others accept it that’s like or or you know participate that those are two different things right well I mean you you hit on one of the key areas that’s going in our society today and that is there are those who want to take what is abnormal and make everybody else conform to that as if it’s normal uh I believe that God loves everybody but I don’t believe that it was intended that men have sex with men and women have sex with women now those who want want to do that they’re welcome to do it but for them to try to take that and say that that’s the norm and that everybody should conform to that does not make any sense what they should be doing instead is making sure that the norm recognizes that there are things that are not consistent with the norm and that we need to learn how to tolerate those things that’s what you do you don’t take everything and turn upside down this is a society that was designed to be to to help people of different faiths be able to function together together even as there might we might have this tendency as human beings to want ours to be the one that that everyone kind of accepts you know but but it’s a place where you couldn’t impose that right should right and it is a fear MH um because as you know in America we tend to be very reactionary we we don’t do longterm planning we just react to what’s going on and you know I fear that there may be a severe reaction to this leftward tilt and that we may start trying to legislate morality I think we just have to be very Vigilant and make sure that we don’t go down that path how do we deal with morality and and because you’ve been arguing I think that we need a shared morality you know it’s not just Christianity that has those ideas you can go to the darkest Jungle of Borneo and a thief what does he do he waits until night time when nobody can see him so he must know what’s wrong right that’s right without having read The Ten Commandments or anything there are certain things that we just know inherently are the wrong things to do and the right things to do you have to have laws you have to have a basic code of morality when everybody becomes their own definition of morality then you got a problem but what what is this about legisl you’re saying you’re concerned that we’re going to be legislating morality so because the the laws are a reflection of our morality as well but what what do you mean when you say you’re concerned for instance we may may start saying you’re required to attend church those kind of things have happened historically so we just have to watch ourselves and make sure that we don’t we don’t do that we need to allow people to make choices and the thing about a free Society is you can live the way you want to live as long as that is not impinging upon someone else’s freedom to live the way they want to live you don’t have the right to turn your stereo up at 2 2 a.m. and blast out the neighborhood that’s just not right you got to have rules against things like that but I don’t want to rule against what you can listen to you can listen to anything you want in the privacy of your home yeah because this is you know again this is the the the Crux of all this is figuring out you know where we affect each other as human beings I’m imposing a little bit on you you’re imposing a little bit on me potentially or I could try impose on you greatly and really infringe upon things this is you know that the system that that that the American Founders creative was trying to make make us make sense of all of this but where do you learn to be reasonable in that in your family right that’s where you learn that there are other people there are other opinions people have property you learn how to respect it all those things come through family you know one thing that’s really struck me is that in large families you can’t be too overly self-centered correct and and that’s why traditionally uh people say you know only children are spoiled now that’s not universally true but it probably does have a tendency to ring true in a lot of circumstances you know I was self-centered as a young person which was my diagnosis of why I had a bad temper because somebody did something to me somebody was in my space I want this you know and once I learned to step outside the center of the circle the violent temper disappeared what if we have the structural problem what if we need to have these larger family units to learn that just to be forced to cope with people outside of ourselves and our families of that we’re connected with so there’s there’s much more of natural inclination to to be helpful and you know well we can incentivize we can incentivize people to have children they did that in Australia they’ve been doing things that would incentivize family formation you know it’s interesting that that you know Hungary has some policies that they’ve had you know mixed mixed success with the reason this book that I’ve been reading about you know the the the large families is is a thing it’s just it’s so rare right like and trying to figure out what is it about people that that that these people in our current time period that make them want to do that because it’s so rare well if you talk to people who come from large families uh they love it they they love their their family structure their siblings and the interactions that they have so there must be something really good about I’ve seldom met anybody from a large family who wasn’t delighted to have been from a large family so as we finish up if you could just maybe recap how do you think we can kind of come out of this yeah I I I hope it’s only a phase that we’re going through I hope people will look back uh in the future and say they temporarily lost their minds and they forgot about the things that made them into a great nation in particular about you know the fun Al things uh like family structure know we need to understand that there’s been a lot of technological things that have impinged upon family relationships you have children who spend a lot more time with their iPhone or with their computer than they do with their families uh you know parents need to be aware of the impact that that has you have to to be aware of your responsibilities as a parent today because children are impacted by so many more things than they used to be a lot of people like to say nothing’s really any different than it ever has been it’s a lot different um the things that 10 year olds know now will blow your mind uh things that we weren’t exposed to until we were adults so in order to really reestablish the family you have to make a concerted effort it has to be high on your priority list having dinner together you know if you’re going to have children looking at television watch it with them and discuss what you just saw that’s what I did with my kids when they were little I didn’t say you can’t watch this you can’t watch it I said let’s watch it together and let’s discuss what it is so that they had a good understanding of what was happening to the society that they live in and and how to insulate themselves and how to be effective in a society like that so it has to be deliberate uh it’s not sort of natural like it was in the old days when you and your family lived out on the farm in the plains of Nebraska it’s very different now well Dr Ben Carson it’s such a pleasure to have had you on again it was wonderful to be here and I look forward to her next time thank you all for joining Dr Ben Carson and me on this episode of American thought leaders I’m your host Yan Kell [Music]
Video Tags: American Thought Leaders,Epoch Times,the epoch times,Jan Jekielek,ATL,ATL the epoch times
Video Duration: 00:51:23
