Tucker Carlson interviews Terry Schilling on fatherhood, family formation, and the forces working against both
Tucker Carlson speaks with Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project and father of eight, about fatherhood, family decline, and the institutional forces Schilling believes are driving it.
Summary
Tucker Carlson sits down with Terry Schilling — conservative policy advocate, former congressman's son, and father of eight — for a wide-ranging conversation about fatherhood, family formation, and what Schilling describes as a deliberate institutional assault on both. Schilling opens by recounting his father's crack addiction and recovery, arguing that the experience ultimately made his father a better man and that the integration of work and family — rather than the corporate "work-life balance" framework — was what saved him. The conversation broadens into a critique of corporate America's role in suppressing family formation through abortion tourism, egg freezing, and dual-income mortgage structures that have inflated housing costs. Schilling draws a through-line from 12th-century Albigensian heresy to modern gender ideology, arguing that the same anti-human, anti-body impulse recurs across history in different ideological forms. The episode closes with both men expressing concern about generational despair among young people while maintaining that Christianity, large families, and a return to natural order represent the path forward.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Terry Schilling's background and the pizza shop
Tucker Carlson: Terry, thanks for doing this. What do you know about fatherhood?
Terry Schilling: Well, my wife and I just had number eight.
Tucker Carlson: When you say "just" —
Terry Schilling: We might go more —
Tucker Carlson: When did you have number eight?
Terry Schilling: Last week.
Tucker Carlson: I just want to convey the imminence. To be fair to you, you're a good husband and father.
Terry Schilling: I did ask her if she wanted us to reschedule this, and she's such a huge fan of your show and everything you do. She said, no, you have to do it. Don't miss out on this.
Tucker Carlson: That's amazing. So as the father of eight — why are you the father of eight? What made you want that?
Terry Schilling: I would say I'm the eldest of ten kids. I grew up working with my dad in our pizza shop. I had an amazing relationship with him and got to see what being a father is firsthand. I had amazing grandparents and amazing great-grandparents. But even more so, I just love my wife. I met her when I was 20 years old. We started dating — that was when we were on a presidential campaign out in Iowa — and I fell madly in love with her and it hasn't stopped. I love being a dad because these kids are all unique and different. They make the world more beautiful. They're funny. They're bad. It strengthens me as a person. I love my wife. I love my kids. I love finding out who they are. When you're raising them, you learn who your children are and who they're going to become, and each one of them is so different.
Tucker Carlson: It's funny — I agree with everything you said, but the one thing you said twice was "I love my wife." So it sounds like your marriage is at the center of your thinking about yourself as a father.
Terry Schilling: Yeah. And I look back — marriage is ups and downs, right? You fight, you have disagreements, you move forward. But any regrets I'm going to have on my deathbed will be when I wasn't as charitable to my wife, or wasn't as kind and caring or patient, or was dismissive. Those are the embarrassing moments of my life. The only thing I'm going to regret is not spending more time with her, not getting to know her better. But I can fix that over the next forty years.
Tucker Carlson: I have a million questions for you just based on this two-minute exchange. But can we go back to the beginning? You said you're one of ten, you worked with your dad at the pizza shop. So already I know you had an unusual childhood. Can you just explain that?
Terry Schilling: I grew up in the Quad Cities — western Illinois and eastern Iowa, on the Mississippi River. Hometown of John Deere tractors. We have our own pizza style called Quad City style pizza.
Tucker Carlson: How is it different?
Terry Schilling: It's a barley malt crust, which is the number one most different thing about it, and it gives it more caramelization. It's crisper, and it's a medium crust — the inside is thinner and on the outside the crust is thicker. It's cut into strips, so if you like crust you get the corner pieces, and if you don't like crust you get the middle pieces because they're thinner. The sauce is more robust — I don't like sweet pizza sauce for some reason, but this one has red pepper in it so it's a little spicy. The sausage is actually the most important thing. The thing that makes it most unique is it's fennel sausage, and it's spicier. The toppings are underneath the cheese, so it gives it a steamed effect instead of a fried effect. It's the best thing ever. I miss it every day.
Tucker Carlson: You're making me hungry. I've never heard pizza described so precisely or lovingly.
Terry Schilling: It's a passion of mine. And I'm not a believer in there being just one pizza place or one pizza that is better than everything else. There are all these different types — New Haven style, New York style, St. Louis, Chicago. There are two types of Chicago style: there's a tavern style that's also cut into strips but it's thinner crust, and then there's obviously the Lou Malnati's type, which is my favorite Chicago style. There's Neapolitan pizza. I know a lot about pizza.
Tucker Carlson: Your family owned a pizza place.
Terry Schilling: Yeah. That was where all of us kids started working. I started at ten. 1996 is when we opened. I was the head dishwasher.
Tucker Carlson: What was it called?
Terry Schilling: St. Giuseppe's Heavenly Pizza. There's an interesting story about my dad in that name. Giuseppe is Joseph in Italian, and St. Joseph is the patron saint of our family. He's the foster father of Jesus. He's the patron saint of fathers, the patron saint of workers. He is the greatest non-divine figure that ever existed, I would say, besides the Virgin Mary obviously. My dad started this pizza place to make more money to provide for the family. I think they had just had number five at the time, and when you become a father you really feel the economic pressures and the stress.
Bob Schilling's crack addiction and recovery
Before he opened the pizza restaurant, my dad was an insurance salesman at Prudential. In the eighties, his parents got divorced when he was a senior in high school, and he became a party guy. His dad was a bartender, his mom also worked at bars. They got divorced and it really adversely impacted his life. He experienced terrible things — I don't want to get into that because it's actually kind of painful. He got way off track. This was during the eighties at the height of the crack epidemic.
He was leaving a liquor store — this was when you could buy alcohol at eighteen — and a crack dealer said, "Hey, you guys smoke weed?" And they said yeah, thinking he was going to sell them weed. He said, "You want something better?" And he gave him crack. Crack is obviously one of the worst substances you can get addicted to. People ruin their lives over it. Only five percent of people who get addicted to crack ever get clean. So my dad developed a crack addiction at the height of the crack epidemic.
As part of the filming of this documentary, I sat down with my mom to talk about her experience as the wife of a crack addict. One thing that blew me away — I knew he had a drug addiction when I was a kid, I knew it was a problem, I knew he got clean — but she told me that there were days where he would go three days without ever coming home. He would go to work, they'd go out drinking afterwards, then they'd smoke crack and do drugs and stay out all night. And then he knew he was in trouble, so he wouldn't go home. He'd go right back into work. And by the way, he was very successful at selling insurance — I think he was ranked 225 out of 5,000 Prudential agents nationwide. So he was very effective, very productive, but he'd keep going out and drinking and he wouldn't come home until the third night.
It really made me think about how these corporations in America — my mom noticed when he wasn't home for three nights, but Prudential Insurance didn't care. Why would they care? He's selling their product. He's producing value for them. And they probably were okay with him smoking crack because it probably made him more effective and efficient and he could get back on the job. And so I've had this revelation over the last few years that the government's bad, it's corrupted, but also the industries are bad. The industries will chew you up and spit you out. And the irony is that there's this false notion of a work-life balance. It's total garbage. It's a total lie. The entire framing of the work-life balance is meant to go to war with life. It is a false dichotomy set up by industries and corporations so that you have to make a choice between your work and your private life. "We'll let you take more vacation time, we'll let you have some paternity leave, but you've got to come back to work and produce value for the company, otherwise you're of no value to us." And it is a way that they have monopolized our actual lives.
In my opinion, based on the experience with my dad, his life turned around when he integrated his work and his life. When the pizza shop came around, he was working with his sons, he was working with his wife. That was the center of our life — the pizza shop. And my dad absolutely got clean. I want to be very clear about that.
The breaking point was when my mom was pregnant with number four — Joseph is his name, he's the one that runs the pizza restaurants now. She filed for divorce when she was pregnant with number four, after another three-day bender.
Tucker Carlson: There's something transformational about becoming a father, especially for the fourth time. You're like, I really gotta grow up. The slower among us take a few kids to figure it out.
Terry Schilling: She filed for divorce. He didn't know where to go, so he went to his mom's house. My grandmother finds out that my mom's divorcing him. She calls my mom and confronts her — which is interesting, because this is a woman who absolutely participated in the no-fault divorce culture. But she said, "Why are you divorcing my son?" And my mom said, "Pat, he's not getting clean. He doesn't want to be married to me. He doesn't want a family." And Grandma Pat hung up the phone. She said, "I'll handle this." And she sat down with my dad and said, "I just want you to know, I'll always love you, always support you. But I never would have divorced your father if he asked me not to." And that was the moment where my dad called my mom and said, "I don't want to get divorced. I want to get clean."
And I think at a deep level, he knew that his problems weren't just because he was a wild and crazy guy — he was filling a major hole in his heart from his parents' divorce. And I'm actually grateful that he developed that crack addiction because it made him a better person. He chose us over the crack addiction. He chose to break the cycle of dysfunction and chaos. He didn't want that to happen to us.
Tucker Carlson: And you can trust a man who's had to face that about himself. He's not lying to himself.
Terry Schilling: It's so humbling. When you go through Narcotics Anonymous or any anonymous program, you have to say, "I'm helpless against this. I rely on a power greater than myself." You have to accuse yourself. You have to go and apologize to everyone you caused damage to. It's such a beautiful program. The people that really take it seriously and go through it end up absolutely transforming.
Tucker Carlson: Humiliating a man can break him or make him. Jesus humiliates Peter right at the end — "I'll never leave you." "You're going to deny me three times." Humiliates him, and then builds the church on him because he's been humiliated. Those are the people I trust. People who face that, who reflect on their own behavior. Those are the best people in the world.
Terry Schilling: I totally agree. Rather than the people who blame everyone else for their problems. A major problem in our world is narcissism — people obsessed with themselves who blame everyone else. And the reality is you have no control over what other people do.
My mom told this story about her first Al-Anon meeting. She comes in and there are all these experienced women who have been dealing with alcoholic or drug-addicted husbands. She goes around the room and says, "I just want to get my husband clean. I'm willing to do whatever I have to do." And they kind of pat her on the head. "Oh, that's very cute that you think you can change your husband. You can't. He's not going to get clean unless he wants to get clean." When I learned that from my mom, it was a major life lesson — you're better off doing self-reflection about where you come short. If you really want to change things and make the world a better place, you have to start with yourself.
Tucker Carlson: What's interesting though is that for a man with four kids to admit that he's addicted to crack — I do think for most men that kind of breaks them at that point. It's too much. They can't pick up the mantle of father, head of household again. But your dad goes on to be successful and have six more kids.
Terry Schilling: Six more kids. And he served a term in Congress.
Tucker Carlson: That's unbelievable.
Bob Schilling's death and the concept of a happy death
Terry Schilling: There was something really beautiful about my dad's life. He got cancer in 2020.
Tucker Carlson: At what age?
Terry Schilling: He was 56 when he was diagnosed. He passed away the next year when he was 57. It was advanced stage intestinal cancer. They wouldn't have been able to pick it up even if they had done colonoscopies or endoscopies, because it was on the outside of his intestines.
The thing that was beautiful about it was I went out — I have a great organization, great chairman and a great president at the time, and they let me go take care of him in the last month and a half. So I'm out there with all my siblings, and you just want to get out of the house and clear your head. So I took them all to Target, we're just getting snacks, and I tell them, "You guys should just be really grateful that he's even alive now, because he had a really bad drug addiction." And my younger siblings — numbers five, six, seven, and eight — they're like, "What are you talking about?" I said, "He was addicted to crack." They had no clue, because he had transformed his life so much.
He was a public figure — a member of Congress. I started speaking about his crack addiction as a way to bring people over, and he gave me permission on his deathbed to talk about it at the funeral. The political reporters from back home were astounded. There's actually a really interesting article where they're trying to call BS on me, saying he had a crack addiction, because they had never heard anything like this about him. That's how much fatherhood and faith transformed his life — my siblings didn't even know about it.
Tucker Carlson: Where are you in birth order?
Terry Schilling: I'm the oldest.
Tucker Carlson: How old's your youngest?
Terry Schilling: My youngest sibling just turned sixteen.
Tucker Carlson: So the nightmare I think for any child, and maybe especially the oldest son, is his father's death. How do you view it now?
Terry Schilling: It's always going to be painful. But there was this moment when he's literally taking his last breaths. Earlier in the day, you could tell there was a shift — when someone's about to die that day, they actually get kind of anxious. They want to get up and move around. He started doing that. We got him back into bed. He was in a lot of pain. And my mom asked him, "What can we do to help?" And he said, "I just want my family and I want Jesus." And that was his call to us — he wanted last rites, he wanted to receive communion. And we got that. We got the whole family in there. And he died with all ten of us at his side. Praying for him, thanking God for Bobby.
That is a beautiful life. And it wouldn't have happened if he hadn't gotten clean. If he had stayed a crack addict and allowed the divorce to go on, what's the max — four kids? He died with all ten of us, grateful to God for his existence and for what he did in our lives.
And it was a beautiful death. I mentioned earlier that St. Joseph is the patron saint of fathers and workers. He's also the patron saint of a happy death. The story is that he's the first person to have a happy death because he died in the arms of Jesus and Mary. I can't get that image out of my head.
Tucker Carlson: I don't think the concept of a happy death even exists in the West at this point. What you're describing is unfortunately not even comprehensible to a lot of people. They don't even know what that means. They're very fearful of death.
Terry Schilling: It's because we've lost faith. We rely on ourselves a lot. You've basically got a really corrupt system in America — on the left you have people that want anarchy, they want to give kids sex changes, they want the government to pay for it, they want to put you in prison for having the wrong political beliefs. But then on the right, they're slaves to corporate America, slaves to the industries and the institutions. And it needs to change.
The family formation crisis and corporate incentives
I was a 2021 Lincoln Fellow at Claremont with Charlie Kirk, and I got to know him a little bit — it's about twelve people total, ten days in Las Vegas. Charlie didn't gamble or drink, and I lost all my money on the first day, so I got to talk to him quite a bit. There was a fascinating discussion where he was debating with a woman named Robbie Smith — one of the best people I've ever met — about the lack of marriage and family formation in America. Who was to blame, men or women? Robbie was saying it's obviously the men — they're smoking pot, watching porn, all distracted, they don't want to get married. Charlie said, no, it's the girl bosses — women wanting to get college degrees and putting off getting married. Charlie turns to me and says, "Terry, you're the guy that works on family policy. What do you think?"
And I had a bad answer, and I hate the answer I gave them. I said I think it's the men, because biblically men are the head of the household, so it's our job to win women over and form our households. The reality, Tucker, is that who's to blame in our society is our elites. All of them.
It's the elites in corporate America that set the HR policies. After the Dobbs decision came down, corporate America was tripping over itself for abortion tourism — "We'll pay for your flight and accommodations to go to California and secure an abortion. We'll freeze your eggs." What is that? I'll tell you what it is. It is corporate America saying: if these women have babies, they'll leave the workforce, and there will be fewer workers, and we'll have to pay people more money. These women will become moms, maybe have another one, they'll have less time to be efficient and effective. It's so depressing. It's so sad.
Tucker Carlson: By the way, if women leave the workforce, then men will once again make more than women, and then people will get married. And the cycle will harden. Because when women make more than men, they don't get married — women don't want to marry men who make less than they do. That's not an attack on women. That's what women self-report in survey after survey. So when women make more than men, the marriage rate collapses. That's what happened in Black America. Now it's happened in rural white America. Same thing.
Terry Schilling: There's this interesting thing where you look at communist China. In the 1950s, they institute the one-child policy and a bunch of different programs that incentivize sterilization. Their birth rate in 1960 was 4.45 per woman. By 1997, they got it down to 1.53 after coercive, tyrannical policies that really hurt and killed a lot of people. When the British gave up control of Hong Kong in 1997, the same year, Hong Kong's birth rate under the loving, gazing eyes of the Western world was at 1.13 — with all the prosperity. Even lower.
Over that time, we have increased efficiency by ninety percent across our industries. We're almost double as effective and efficient as we were back in 1960. But more of our money goes towards existential costs. It was fifty percent of your income in the 1960s that went to your mortgage, your car, your insurance — all the things you need to live. Today it's eighty percent. So we're more efficient, we're producing way more goods than we've ever produced, but we're making less money. We need two incomes to make it in America today.
And people are buying homes with two incomes. So when you lose your job, you go into foreclosure. This is all industry-driven.
Tucker Carlson: Why do we allow people to buy homes with two incomes? All that's done is jack up the price of housing in good school districts, because there are only a few good school districts in the country. If the incomes have doubled, you're in a bidding war. We have sacrificed our lives for business, for industry, for efficiency. And we're more miserable than ever.
Terry Schilling: And they love us back. The iPhone should be free. They need the iPhone to deliver all of their ads and their propaganda to you and to subvert everything you believe in. Why do we have to pay $1,500 or $1,600 for an iPhone? That doesn't make any sense to me.
What makes a good father
Tucker Carlson: So you're one of ten, you're now the father of eight. You're in a pretty good spot to describe what makes a good father.
Terry Schilling: If you boil what becoming a father is and what it means, it's self-sacrifice, which is love. Victor Hugo, author of Les Misérables, said that you can give without loving, but you can't love without giving. And I think the ultimate example of what a man is, is Christ on the cross. Here's a guy that is literally giving up everything. If you actually read the Passion, he's fighting all the way up until the final moment. These people are kicking him, he's falling, he has been beaten and scorched, he is bleeding profusely. He was fighting and struggling to get to Calvary the whole time. It was a submission to God's will, but he had to work for it. He had to push himself to get up every time. And he did it for us. That is what we're called to be as fathers — self-sacrificial.
I also think fathers are merciful, but they're just. Someone described this to me — Pat Fagan, amazing guy who does a lot of pro-family policy. He told me the difference between the devil and Jesus, which is amazing. He said the devil always deviates from the law, but shows no mercy when you break the law. Christ never deviates from the law, but shows infinite mercy when you apologize. And I think that's the role of a father — not to stray from the rules, but to be merciful to your children.
I think if you're really doing it right, you're spending a lot of one-on-one time with each of your kids. Believe it or not, even though I have eight kids, I make time for each one of them individually. And it doesn't have to be hours at a time. You can do a five or ten-minute trip to 7-Eleven, get some snacks. Your kids will open up to you. You have to have that one-on-one time. But if you were to boil it all down, it's sacrificing yourself for your children and your wife. Being merciful. And making sure your kids know the rules and don't make these mistakes. Discipline. These are the most important things when it comes to being a father.
The decline of the West and the attack on men
Tucker Carlson: You often hear people compare the West — America, Europe — to Rome. Clearly, Western civilization is in decline. And at the same time, you hear another set of people tell you that masculinity is the problem, toxic masculinity. And young people hear both of these things and a lot of them become consumed by despair.
Terry Schilling: Men are not irredeemable. Men can be stronger. But you've got to fix one thing before that happens, and that's fatherhood. No society without fathers can continue.
Tucker Carlson: How do you keep fathers from breaking? I've seen it many times where a father loses his job, he feels like a loser, and then he starts behaving like a loser. And then his wife and children are unimpressed. And so he becomes even less impressive and just cycles out of life — either literally or falls apart with booze or other self-destructive activities.
Terry Schilling: We're seeing more and more of that today at an embarrassing level. But the point of a system is what it produces, not what it says it produces. And our system today is attacking men. I work all the time in DC. All we do is pass laws and get people elected to help protect the family. And you talk to people on Capitol Hill — you can't bring up all of the attacks on young boys in schools, the attacks on young men and how difficult it is, because they say women have it worse.
Tucker Carlson: They still say that?
Terry Schilling: It's starting to change. But you really can't — there's no constituency in Washington for it, even though there's a huge constituency with the American people on this. The politicians don't want to hear about it. They definitely don't want to talk about it. They used to say girls are discriminated against in schools. Well, of course, women dominate schools completely from top to bottom. They graduate at a far higher rate at every level than boys do. They used to say women are paid a percentage of the male wage. Well, women make more than men now, nationally adjusted. The data are in. Boys are falling behind, not girls. And I've just been amazed that people in DC won't admit that. It's one of the last acceptable bigotries — against men.
Paul Ehrlich and the population control movement
Tucker Carlson: Paul Ehrlich just died. Can you explain who Paul Ehrlich was for those who don't know?
Terry Schilling: Paul Ehrlich wrote a book in 1968 called The Population Bomb, and he basically said that the whole world was going to collapse if we didn't stop people from having kids. He was incredibly evil. China's one-child policies — he didn't go over and advise them, but they read his books and used his scores. He wanted to sterilize people forcibly. He wanted tax incentives for people who did sterilize themselves. He wanted limits on how many kids you could have. He supported forcing people to get licenses before they could have children. These are crazy ideas.
The irony about Paul Ehrlich is that he made all these predictions about devastation and chaos in the world if we didn't address the population bomb, and none of them came true. Literally none of his ideas came true. The only one that got close was he predicted that in the year 2000 the UK would fall. That's the closest he's gotten.
Tucker Carlson: The UK is falling, by the way.
Terry Schilling: But not because Britons are having too many kids. It's the opposite. They're not having any kids. But Paul Ehrlich was an atrocious man. One of the things he was very passionate about was his guidance for television and movies — if you depict a family, they should be small. No big families in movies. How did Paul Ehrlich have the right to advise filmmakers and TV producers on what their art should be?
Tucker Carlson: Everyone was scared to death. They bought it hook, line, and sinker. And it's not new. The idea that people are pollution is so old. The idea that you sacrifice your children to the gods in order to become happy and prosperous — that's a pretty old concept.
The Albigensians and the recurring anti-human ideology
Terry Schilling: Well, there's one group — I actually have a joke for you. Two priests walk into a bar. One's a Jesuit, the other's a Dominican. They're debating about who the best order is. The Jesuit says, "We were founded by St. Ignatius of Loyola. We're the most academic, the smartest, and we were founded to combat the Protestants." The Dominican priest says, "I think we have you beat. We were founded by St. Dominic, who founded us to destroy the Albigensians." "Who are the Albigensians?" "When's the last time you've heard of an Albigensian?"
Tucker Carlson: They've never personally threatened me.
Terry Schilling: You would think so because you haven't heard of them. But their ideas are everywhere. The Albigensians were a twelfth-century heretical cult of Christianity. They basically believed that the soul was perfect and pure, but that the body and the physical world were corrupted. And so they started punishing people for getting married. They started encouraging people not to have children. Anything pleasurable was a sin for the Albigensians. If you had sex with your wife, having a baby was the biggest sin you could commit.
Tucker Carlson: I bet they were against SUVs too. I know these people.
Terry Schilling: They thought the worst thing you can do is trap a pure soul into a corrupted body. And those ideas are still here. I see Albigensians everywhere in our society. Their ideas have not died out. They've just taken different shapes. It's why these corporations are promoting abortion and egg freezing. It's why states like California will take children from their parents if the parents don't affirm their gender identity. The family precedes the state. The family is the original community, the original society. There is no right to take children away from their parents unless there's actual serious abuse.
You've got Thomas Malthus who believed that people were pollution, Paul Ehrlich. These guys' policies have been failures. They've caused misery and chaos and suffering, but they've taken hold. All of our elite institutions have been pushing these policies on us.
Tucker Carlson: These ideas shapeshift — all of these anti-human, anti-God ideas manifest as slightly different ideologies depending on the period, whether it's the Albigensians or the Marxists or the Green Party. And then even the climate people sort of gave up on that in exchange for building data centers. Data centers are incompatible with green politics because they're such a massive energy draw. But what's the point of the data centers? It's to create artificial intelligence. And I'm beginning to wonder if the agenda there is very different. It does seem like replacing thinking with the judgment of a machine.
Terry Schilling: I think it's very similar. At the heart of the entire AI industry is the belief that human beings need AI, that they need some type of overlord above them that's way smarter, that can process data. That is the worst thing.
Francis Bacon was another figure — he's considered the father of modern science. He basically believed that human beings could solve anything, that nature was actually meant for us to completely alter and mess with. But nature exists and should be respected. There are rules. You shouldn't have sex outside of marriage. You should be open to life. You shouldn't steal, cheat, or lie. You can't kill the innocent. You can't sterilize the innocent. But these guys believe that they are their own gods.
I had a Dominican priest — when the whole sex changes for kids thing took off, I went to a very dark place. I couldn't believe it was happening. So I called my friend Tim from Franciscan University, who's a Dominican priest now, and I'm lamenting all this. I can't believe they're sterilizing kids and mutilating their bodies. And he broke it down. He said what we're dealing with right now with this issue is two things: one, it's very, very old, and two, it is very, very new. The old is the Garden of Eden — it is us trying to become our own gods and shape everything about us, even rejecting the biological sex that God gave you. But he said the new is the technology. Previous societies did not even understand hormone levels. So we have these new technologies. That is the Francis Bacon effect — the new technologies, conquering nature and reshaping it to something darker, something they can control and manipulate.
Tucker Carlson: I don't think you can beat nature, can you?
Terry Schilling: No. Nature always wins. That's because God is real. There was a designer for our universe and for our world and for humanity. And he made these rules. And if you reject them, you're going to have a bad time.
Tucker Carlson: That's why I like bad weather — because it reminds you of that. It doesn't matter what your ideology is. If you go out naked in a snowstorm, you're going to die, because nature is more powerful than you. That's just a fact. You can change your sex, I guess, but you can't change the need to be at 98.6 degrees at all times. So it's such a great reminder.
The eternal standard of fatherhood
I wonder, as it relates to fatherhood — the description of a good father, because fatherhood is part of nature, can't be that different from era to era. No matter what we describe in the moment as a good father, there is a kind of absolute standard for good fatherhood. There has to be, because there is in the natural world.
Terry Schilling: Yeah. And it hasn't changed. There are eternal truths. A good father has always provided for his family. He's always protected them. And he's procreated. You have to procreate to become a father. And discipline and teach rules, be merciful, teach your kids.
There are a lot of new studies that have been coming out over the last ten years about fatherhood and how it impacts and shapes individuals and kids. One thing that was very interesting to me — I think it was in Reason magazine of all places — they wrote about how fathers are actually the ones that instill empathy in their children. The way they explained it was that fathers and men are naturally concerned about themselves. We're kind of in our own heads, always thinking about what we need to do for our lives. So when your kid breaks your four-hundred-dollar drill, you're going down and lecturing them: "You know how hard I had to work for that four-hundred-dollar drill? I can't believe you used it without my permission." We get kids to think about other people. Whereas moms are always going to be like, "Oh, don't worry about it, your dad won't mind, just get another one." Moms build self-esteem. Moms still play a pivotal role. There's a use to teaching your kids not to be suicidal over breaking a drill. But dads are the ones that instill empathy.
Tucker Carlson: It's so obvious. Women are more empathetic — or we think of them that way — but societies in which there are very few fathers, matriarchal societies, are far less empathetic than patriarchal societies. You know that because there are massively high crime rates in all societies run by women. Those are way less empathetic societies. That's the proof.
The lie sold to women about careers
Terry Schilling: I think one of the ways that our elites have really screwed us over is convincing women that having a career, having a good job, is the basis of a good life — and not becoming a mother.
Tucker Carlson: Do women believe that, do you think?
Terry Schilling: Yes. Ask any woman.
Tucker Carlson: Who actually believes that though? That a career working at a bank, working at an AI startup, is actually preferable to having a husband who loves you, takes care of you, and provides you children? I don't think there's a woman alive who actually believes that.
Terry Schilling: There are a lot of lies in our society and people will say the lies.
Tucker Carlson: The lies we tell ourselves are the most powerful.
Terry Schilling: And women today, I think they all know deep down they really would do better with a husband. They really would be happier with a kid. Biologically, obviously, with a husband that could provide — why do you want to go help Jeff Bezos make more money? Why do you want to go help Bill Gates make more money? Why do you want to help all these super wealthy billionaires make more money, so you can be quote "independent" as you become totally dependent on a company that has no regard for you at all as a person?
Tucker Carlson: "I'm so independent. I work at JP Morgan."
Terry Schilling: Tucker, these women are missing out. The egg freezing and the abortion tourism — it's so evil. My dad died with ten of us surrounding him. That's beautiful. You're going to have a lonely death the way things are heading. And I don't think they tell you that at your orientation in investment banking.
Tucker Carlson: There's no encouragement to think through to the end. How does this end exactly? By yourself? In an assisted living community where there's some foreign-born nurse who doesn't know your name? That is the end for a lot of people. And we should tell them that at the start. How do you want this to end? That's a totally fair question, whether you're talking about war or your own life.
AI, artificial wombs, and the commodification of the human person
Terry Schilling: If you go back to the AI situation — a lot of speculation that AI is going to eliminate every single job and we'll all be prosperous. That's the lie they're telling us. We won't need to make money, we won't need to work, machines will run our lives. Fine. But let's imagine a scenario where you don't have to work, where you are living in heaven. You're going to have a family. You're going to have children. That is the ideal.
Tucker Carlson: I don't have to imagine how it works because I grew up in a trust fund world. So I know exactly how it works. You become an alcoholic, sleep with the au pair, you're reviled by your children, then you shoot yourself. That's what a life of no working looks like. And then on the bottom end, the welfare world — which is the mirror image of the trust fund — it's the same. It's true despair. Because a man needs work for meaning in his life. He protects and provides. That's where his sense of himself comes. That's his duty, and if he doesn't achieve it, he hates himself. So a world without work is hell.
Terry Schilling: The people that put their careers first and are going along with this lie — they're living it. And what they're missing out on: the work is the what, right? It's what you do. The family is the why. You get a job and you work hard at it so that you can provide for your family. The idea that you have a job so that you can build a legacy for yourself is not right. No one will remember you, especially the company you work for. The day you leave the company, they are going to immediately start preparing to replace you. Your children can't do that. Your children won't do that unless you're a bad mom or a bad dad. You're missing out on the eternal. You're missing out on the why.
Tucker Carlson: You work so your wife will be proud of you, just to put it in one sentence. That's actually nature. And I just feel like the program that we have sold to young people in our country is so unnatural and bizarre, and would make no sense to any so-called backward country. They'd look at this and be like, what? And it can't persist. We're fighting gravity here. This is not the natural order at all.
Terry Schilling: Well, I don't think anything's ever doomed. But the lies we're telling ourselves currently — men and women are exactly the same, they occupy no unique role in the universe, working for Microsoft is more meaningful than having five children — these are such obvious lies that they have to crumble at some point.
Tucker Carlson: And I do think they're going to be crumbling. You couldn't say this ten years ago.
Terry Schilling: The crisis wasn't as apparent. How urgent the family formation crisis was, or that we were prioritizing putting women in the workforce over family — I was in high school from 2001 to 2005 and family was the center of everyone's life. At least in the part of the country I grew up in. Maybe the Quad Cities is just better than all these major cities or East Coast or West Coast stuff. But family was very much the center of everyone's life.
Dog parks, senior citizens, and misallocated resources
One big change I've noticed in our society is public parks. Public parks are interesting because they're in major cities and space is finite. So when you decide to put an area up as a public park, you're basically telling people what your top priorities are. In the fifties and sixties, when we had the massive expansion of parks throughout our country, they were all kids' parks. When you say "I'm going to go to the park," you immediately envision playgrounds and swings and merry-go-rounds. But today, if you go to inner cities, dog parks are outranking kid parks. The kid parks are empty.
I went to a dog park and talked to some of the people there. I love dogs, by the way — I don't want to attack dogs. But I talked with one guy and asked him if he was ever planning to get married and have kids. He said, "Well, I've got all these international weddings I have to go to." We're directing all of these resources to dog runs and dog parks and not kid parks.
In Hong Kong, it's actually a bit worse. The parks are actually for senior citizens — low-impact exercise machines like hip twisters and all of that. They don't have children. Their birth rate is like 1.09 or something. It's devastating.
Either we direct the money and the resources towards dogs or the elderly. If you look at federal spending on welfare and entitlements, it's five to one — welfare benefits going to people sixty-five and up. We need to start reversing that back to young people and families to get them a more stable life. We're telling the world and our citizens what our priorities are every time we build a dog park.
Tucker Carlson: That breakdown of federal spending is an indictment of a specific generation — I'm not going to name them, but boomers. The youngest are sixty-two, the oldest are eighty. Once that generation, which has completely destroyed America — not all of them, but most — once they're gone, don't you think there will be change?
Terry Schilling: I think there'll be a lot of change. These boomers have really screwed up our country and they really hurt young people. The boomers are the most selfish. And if World War II was such a massive success, how did it give rise to that generation? They came back from the war and had those people.
I think the greatest generation — the World War II generation — they went through the Depression, they went through a world war, some of them went through two world wars. I think they were ready for prosperity. And I think they kind of spoiled their children.
I sat down with Bishop Robert Barron and he told the story of King David and his son Absalom, who killed his brother, tried to overthrow King David, rose up, and then got killed. And this is what we are experiencing with the Boomers — they are Absalom. They weren't disciplined. They didn't have to go without.
My great-grandmother was sixty-four when I was born. She lived another thirty-one years. The stories I would hear from her — I was always grateful. I think the greatest generation instilled gratitude. And I don't know why it didn't translate to their children, because their children are only entitled. They were the generation that gave us all of this nonsense.
Tucker Carlson: And they're sitting on all the wealth. They're sitting in multiple homes.
Terry Schilling: In the big beautiful bill, I liked most of it, but they give $6,000 checks to senior citizens. They don't need money. They have all the money. They have all the homes and they're not selling them. It costs $750,000 to get a townhome in DC. Families can't afford that. Townhomes are for families — for new families, actually. They're supposed to be affordable, but now they're $750,000 because the boomers aren't selling their multiple homes in California.
There's this interesting dynamic where there was a lawsuit challenging whether you could do property tax freezes for senior citizens. The people challenging it were saying this is age discrimination — you can't give them a different set of rules than the rest of us. And the courts obviously ruled in favor of the boomers because the judges are all boomers. But it's insane that we are freezing property taxes for these boomers who got their homes for almost nothing. They've had so much appreciation in the value of their properties — it's skyrocketed. Why do they get tax relief when working families bear all the burden? The tax burden and the onus is all on young families. And we need to start reversing this. If we don't start reversing this, young people are not going to get married.
Young people's radical politics and the need for family
Tucker Carlson: They're also going to get really, really dark politics. I interviewed Nick Fuentes earlier this year and was attacked for it, whatever. But one of the main reasons I wanted to talk to him was — this guy's super popular. What is he saying? What is this? This is a totally different kind of politics, completely different from anything I've covered at fifty-six. And one of the things I learned from the experience was that younger people have totally different politics. And by my standards as a middle-aged person, they're pretty radical. How did that happen? It happened by taking away all their opportunity and then ignoring them when they complained about it. And my sense is that Nick Fuentes will be considered pretty moderate very soon. So if you want a stable, moderate country, you have to take care of people and give them opportunity. There are massive consequences for behaving this way.
Terry Schilling: You want more fathers, you want more families. If you want moderate politics, you want people that are serious about solutions to problems. You want more fathers. You want more mothers. You want children and families. Because when you become a father, when you become a husband, you're thinking long-term.
Tucker Carlson: It's the ballast in a ship. It keeps it steady. I'm a dad, I've got kids. Can't get too crazy because I've got children. That's just a baseline impulse in fathers.
Terry Schilling: These kids are being radicalized because most of them are products of the divorce generation. You have compounding dysfunction — not only did their parents divorce, but their parents' parents divorced. I went into my marriage under the belief that this is the most sacred of all the agreements I'm ever going to sign in my life. I can sign contracts with corporations, I can sign business deals, but this is the one I can never break. It has to come before everything else.
But this whole no-fault divorce situation basically said, no, your marriage is actually the least important of all the agreements. The only agreement you can't break in modern America is paying your credit card interest.
Tucker Carlson: And I've suggested before — don't pay your credit card interest. Stiff Citibank. That's my personal view. And people looked at me like I was a freak. But the same people are like, "Yeah, well, it didn't work out, I got divorced." So that just tells you where the priorities are. It's immoral to stiff a bank, but it's okay to stiff your wife? How does that work?
Terry Schilling: It's obviously predatory. It's obviously not treating the human person as a child of God. They're treating us like hogs in a machine. That's what the elites in all the industries view us as — pieces to play on the field that can make their products and do their services. They don't look at you as a dad. They don't look at you as a husband. They want you back in the workforce for maximum efficiency.
And you're reading all about these artificial wombs and egg freezing and IVF and all of that stuff. That is ultimately the commodification of the human person.
Tucker Carlson: Why not create a union where we all agree not to pay our credit cards, just to negotiate terms? Because Trump was always bragging about how, if you take a big enough loan from a bank, they have to negotiate with you — you are in charge because they are exposed. Why not create a union to do the same for the entire public? Stop sending credit card solicitations to kids. Stop charging twenty percent interest. That should be illegal. That's usury. The mafia used to go to jail under RICO for that, but it's okay for Citibank?
Terry Schilling: This is what really annoys me about Republicans — they're so corporate-centered, so free-market-centered. When Trump mandated that credit card companies couldn't go over ten percent, all these libertarian right-wing think tanks started criticizing him as an enemy of the free market. If that's an enemy of the free market, then consider me one. Because they're taking advantage of poor people. Rich people don't really use credit cards — they pay them off every month. But the poor people are the ones that pay the interest. And that's why it needs to be broken. We still have payday loans. The only kind of capitalism they seem to really endorse is sending tax dollars to weapons companies.
Lessons from his father and the hope for the future
Tucker Carlson: Let me end on a more positive note. You clearly consider your dad a great father, and you've become a father of eight. What did you learn from him? As you go about the business of raising eight children, when do you think about your dad?
Terry Schilling: I think about him a lot. I think of him every time I hold a new baby. My dad — this is actually advice for anyone that becomes a father or is going to have another kid. If you're the dad, you've got to be in the delivery room, and you've got to watch that kid come out.
Tucker Carlson: That's a wild experience.
Terry Schilling: It is incredible. It is so euphoric. You're the first guy to see that kid's face. Your wife's going through all this hell, pushing this kid out or getting her stomach ripped open. The least you can do to participate is to see your child come out. My dad advised me on the first one, and I haven't ever looked away since. It's such a special experience.
Working hard, sacrificing yourself, accusing yourself. And accusing your kids — I think it's okay to accuse your kids. My dad, because of his addiction, was always paranoid that one of us kids was a drug addict. And it's good to be paranoid. One time we're working in the pizza restaurant — you get tips when you clean out the tables. Well, my brother is just weird and he keeps his dollar bills rolled up. I'll never forget my dad patting him down to see if there's any coke in it. And my brother's like, "Dad, I'm not doing coke." But that was actually him loving us, because he was thinking — well, I did crack, so it's not impossible.
Tucker Carlson: I found a rolled-up bill in one of my kid's pockets. That would be the first thing I would think.
Terry Schilling: Obviously. And at the time you're offended — how could you ever possibly think that? Kids are so offended. But he was a crack addict. And I think one of the benefits of having a crack addict as a father — people hear that and think, oh my gosh, that must have been so terrible. I'm grateful for it. And it prepared me for the world we live in today, which is like Gen Z are all being raised by women on amphetamines and SSRIs and Xanax and all of that. So it helps me relate to them and actually connect with them, to know what they're going through and helps me speak to them.
Tucker Carlson: Do you think they have a sense that their parents are on drugs?
Terry Schilling: I don't think the parents hide it. These women — it's a whole thing. They compete. They brag about the pharmaceuticals they're on. Tucker, the industries have monopolized our time so much and taken over our lives that these poor women and men at this point have to take Adderall to have the energy to do their job every day. But then they have to take anti-anxiety medication to combat that. And then they're taking all these other pills. You take a pill, then you have to take pills to combat the side effects. That is what these industries have done through this fake concept known as the work-life balance — they've monopolized our lives and taken over to where we need pharmaceutical drugs just to exist and be happy.
Tucker Carlson: Do you feel like change is coming?
Terry Schilling: Some type of change. I don't know if it's going to be good, but it seems pretty dark right now. Forty percent of Gen Zers say they don't want to get married. Forty-three percent say they don't want to have kids. That's insane. That is not a sign for hope. Now, I do think there are other charts that show some hope — liberals and progressives are not having kids, but the Christians are. I think that's a very good sign for our country. I just don't know if it's in time. I hope it is.
If times are going to get bad, you want to have kids. The Bible is very clear — children are a blessing from the Lord. "Blessed is a man whose quiver is full. He will not be left in shame as his enemy is at the gates." We need more kids. We're going to keep going. We're open to whatever God sends us. Because I don't think I have a right to tell God no. If my wife gets pregnant, I think there was a divine hand in that. There's an old proverb — I forget who said it — but every new baby born is a sign from God that he wants the world to continue. And he's sending his helpers. He's sending us people that have different skill sets, different dispositions. So we're going to keep taking them.
Tucker Carlson: Who wouldn't want to sit at the head of a big table and be the patriarch? That seems like the most basic desire of the male heart. I thought that's what men did want.
Terry Schilling: I've always wanted that my whole life. Dogs running around, little conversations going on at the end of the table. It's the best. What else is there?
Tucker Carlson: No amount of room service or carnival cruises or weekends in St. Barts could approach the deep joy and satisfaction of sitting at the head of a table of your descendants. It's like the greatest thing that's ever been.
Terry Schilling: I think the issue is the single life, the unmarried life, the childless life — it's very comfortable. It is fun. You can do whatever you want. It's innocuous. It's like weed, right? Weed seems like it's not a threat, not a big deal. But people will go forty, fifty years smoking pot every day. And then by the time that time is over, they look back at their life and they can't remember anything. They don't know what happened. They don't know what they aimed for.
The single life is just as innocuous. It doesn't seem threatening. It actually seems — you're told by every corner of our society, by the elites — that being single and child-free is actually prosperity, is actually human flourishing. So these poor people have been lied to. They've been manipulated into serving the state and their corporate masters.
Tucker Carlson: Man, that's the lamest thing to ever want.
Terry Schilling: It is.
Tucker Carlson: Terry Schilling, thank you for this. Congratulations on number eight. It's incredible. I know people probably say catty things to you when you get on airplanes, but deep down they're envious.