 The way things are are not ordered naturally towards my family thriving. Therefore, since I'm a father, my vocation is to be a father, it's also harming my relationship with God. And the modern world therefore is taking me away from God and my family. I don't want that. So this is my response. My name is Jason Craig. This is the Till and Keep podcast. And today I'm going to interview Connor Gallagher, CEO of Tan Publishing. So this is our first episode of Till and Keep. It's actually a partnership that arose partly. We could talk about the enterprises that go on. Sword and Spade magazine that I'm involved with. Fraternas involved with and Tan Publishers. There's some overlap there. But you and I met and I think actually the space where we met explains a lot of this podcast and the purpose of it, which you came to my house to kill a pig. I sure did. Yeah, a mutual friend of ours said, hey, you hear about this Jason Craig fella? And I've been hearing about you kind of in the general area. Everyone talked about you. And after a while it was like, this Jason Craig is like a mystical figure. I hate that because then people show up and the disorder of naked children and piles of manure everywhere. Right. Well, that really wasn't that because I knew you lived on a farm. I expected that. But given how much everybody praised you, I definitely expect you to be better looking. That was just, I don't know what to have expected. But my buddy, our buddy Chad said, hey, you want to go kill a pig? Let's go to a pig slaughtering weekend. I'm like, how long, how does it take two days to kill a pig? I mean, how big is this pig? So we showed up there and it was like this beautiful ritual you had. There was about, I don't know, a dozen guys. And we were kind of sleeping in the barracks that you have on your property. And between the pig slaughtering festivals, we sat around a campfire and just talked and smoked cigars for two days. It was fantastic. I don't think I knew that you had anything to do with Tain. And then you said something, well, you know, I don't know. I don't know how you explain it eventually. But that weekend and that experience between us does explain, you know, all these things I'm involved with in that, I think in our conversations that I appreciate you appreciate is that there is this massive, coherent, beautiful, awe-inspiring intellectual tradition of the church, of the West, of Christendom. And then there's working fathers that are doing their best, trying really hard. And there's not a lot of overlap between them. And I don't mean let's brand man stuff and, you know, I'm not talking cigars and shoes here. I'm not really men and the fact that still today, men are the heads of the home for better or worse, you know, and when people, I don't know if they scoff at that. It's like, look, even if the father is missing, he's absent, he still shapes what the home is like. He still shapes the order. That's how important he is. And a lot of it has to do with his work, the fact of man being called to work as a sort of primordial, even prelapsarian reality, right? So that's where this comes from, till and keep, that God said to Adam, I want you to work this garden, right? To till this garden, which is an interesting thing, because the garden was already perfect. So what's he going to do, right? It's like when you show up in a perfectly manicured landscape or a formal garden, no one tells you to work. It's perfect. I'm not going to touch this. But he gave us that. And then he tells us to work in it. And then he says to keep it, to preserve it. So don't destroy it. So for a lot of men, it is our work, where the intersection of what we believe, what we cherish, all of these things intersect. And a lot of times we're working it. And sometimes we feel like we're destroying things by accident, just whether it's relationships or whatever's going on. That is the challenge. That is particular to fatherhood, I think. So there's a debate, you know, is culture downstream of politics or is politics downstream of culture? Like what's really shaping our lives? And it's like, I don't care what it is. Dad is downstream of all of it. Whether it's the new gadget, the new technology, tax laws, the way sports are going, the way sports aren't going, school, all these things tend to impact dad. And he just, whether or not he's bringing order to all that, really matters in a family. But bringing to bear on that, that large intellectual tradition, that is, you know, the thrust of the magazine, Sword and Spade, the purpose of it is that men, they have to wield the sword. We have to defend our families from things that are evil, things that are erroneous, error, all that stuff. We have to defend. We have to pick up the sword. But I actually think that comes to us naturally. We're prone to defend pretty quickly. I mean, I think a man with a decent information and a little bit of a spine is pretty prone to defend that what he'd love, even if he finds himself, maybe scared if he's alone in a, you know, a bar fight. But if his kid's being threatened, he's going to fight. The Spade, though, represents the cultivation of the garden. Actually building something worth defending, preserving. And we know that we have to go to war. But you know, scripture talks about the beating the sword into a plow share, into an implement of growth, of built, getting back to the garden itself. That we are going to cultivate and grow what is good from God's creation in the order that he gave us. That's where you and I have had a lot of conversations that I've appreciated that that's not thought about. We have like these worlds of families. We have these worlds of the church. And then, you know, all the, the, the, the splintering off of those things. And then we go to work. We go to work. So in this first episode, sorry, let me go back up. But we go to work. And then these things are never, it's not just that they're not integrated. Sometimes they're, they're destroying one another. I mean, they actually, they are in conflict. So I have since that conflict and some of the intellectually and practically the roads I'm going down, I've gone down is the route of homesteading that modern life seems to have a centrifugal force to it. That the more you do it, the more it pulls you away from your family. I think a lot of families, they have more kids and spoiler alert, you have 15, but they have more kids. The kids get busy. The parents get busy. And all of a sudden something happens and the center cannot hold and the family breaks apart. And then the centripetal force is when something actually the act itself pulls it towards the center. So the reason we homestead, the reason we live on a farm and that we would like to help and other people learn how to do the homesteading and be a part of that in farming and agriculture is not, I don't know, an agrarian response to my, it's not a fear of technology. It's not a prepper thing. It's actually, I'm there because it naturally without my effort pulls me in to be with my family. This morning before I came in here, we had to, we were, we have a small dairy. We had to skim the milk today because we're making butter today. That means we had to get the skim milk, moved over to the pigs. They were across the farm. It required all of us. So it's not some simple quiet life. It actually was really hectic and, but it was great. And we were together. And at the end of it, it pulled us together, that act. So you're not just reacting and running from something. You're running to something. You're proactively going after something. Yeah. I think it's an absurd charge that homesteaders are always running away from something. I mean, it's just as if people, you know, well, you can't be a missionary out in the country as if people in the country don't have souls or something. So yeah, there's a, I'm not running from something. I actually, I'm into it anyway. I think a lot of men into it that the way things are, are not ordered naturally towards my family thriving. Therefore, since I'm a father, my vocation is to be a father. It's also harming my relationship with God. And the modern world therefore is taking me away from, from God and my family. I don't want that. So this is my response. But on this first show, instead of going, and let's confirm that and talk to some homesteaders, you're a CEO. I mean, you're always telling me about different businesses you're involved with. I know the main one that listeners would know is the Tan Publishing, St. Benedict Press. Do we mention any other ones? No, that's good enough. Okay, stop there. I got a new idea. I want to pitch to you. I'm just kidding. No new ideas. That you agree with what I just said, that the homestead is a natural setting for those things. You've actually experienced it. You have a little bit of a farm thing going on. A hobby thing going on. Okay. We'll talk about your dead goat in a minute. I don't know what you're talking about, apparently. But for the businessmen out there, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but you said something to the effect of, we actually have gained a lot of wisdom in business on how to make money. But what have we not done? Yeah, I think that just to kind of give a very broad historical perspective on intelligence in the world, you go back to the Renaissance time where the most brilliant people were working on art and music and sculpting and all these Michelangelo type people. And in the Middle Ages, they were working on theology of the Aquanuses. Well, in recent times, the most brilliant people have been working on building the manufacturing line and now it's technology. And that's where the most brilliant people are going is things that make a profit. So as the corporate landscape, the history of corporate management is a rather new phenomenon. I mean, there's always been corporations, but the art of management, the science of corporate management is really in the last 100 years or less because it's had to keep up with all the technological evolutions that have happened. So the most brilliant minds, in my opinion, have figured out how to run organizations which are groups of individuals aiming at a certain goal with efficiency and clarity of purpose, vision, core values, aligning each other around certain goals and having systems and metrics of success, communication abilities. So the best minds have been working on that in order to make a profit for shareholders. And that's not bad. It's just they, of course, take it too far and there's the problems of corporate America. My point, though, is as I've been spending my career learning the art and science of business and as my family has been growing right along with the businesses that I run, I've realized that there's so many overlaps. And so many of the skills that I'm kind of paid to learn and implement at work with other adults, I'm sitting there saying, why can't I apply a lot of this to the household and to help the family, which is a group of individuals gathered together to accomplish certain goals. Why can't I use some of these skills to go home and to bring order and structure? I have a comment and then a question on that. I mean, what's interesting is that it is, as I talk to men of like a conservative sort, that tend to be that maybe they work for a large corporation and they sort of know, yeah, there's some excess here. Maybe it's a little bit cannibalistic in the way the market is and we're always kind of tending towards monopolies, whether we like it or not. All that stuff. All that stuff. What's interesting, though, the things that it's often devouring is the things that they would prefer to conserve, would be local economies and families and stuff. Actually, the tendency outward of the corporations tends to be to consume things that those that work there might want to conserve. So it's an interesting, I don't know, it's a conflict paradox, but what you're saying is fascinating that if applying, I don't know, some of these lessons to our family, okay, let's preserve this thing. This is just the reality we face, which of course, it would be fascinating to do a follow-up on how much do we really need to challenge and embrace that. Maybe I can argue a hyperlocalism and you can crush me. No, but I think you'd agree with the basic principle. I think this. I think that as business in the last 50 to 100 years has gotten more and more efficient and productive, families have gone like at the exact inverse. Yeah, so that's my question. You said, why am I not doing this? And that's my question. I have had the experience of being with men in an office like this guy is a great leader. He is bringing order out of chaos. And then we have the family, which is naturally ordered towards God and towards thriving. But that order is going into chaos. Yeah, I mean, how is it that a lot of men, especially, you know, just talk from a man standpoint, I see it. I see them at business or in other environments with community groups or whatever, where they stand out, they're a leader and they get home and they're a bumbling moron. And that's just be, I mean, it's serious. I mean, there's something that makes them dumb when they get home. And, you know, I see guys who are, you know, high-powered doctors or lawyers or whatever, and they're able to chart out, you know, a plan of action to get certain things done and they're able to rally the troops to get it done and have metrics of success they're measuring. And they go home and they can't get their teenagers to do any chores. What happened? You know, why did the human connection fall apart? The moment they go back to the very place where they should be even more influential. So there's something, you know, something about the modern world like you're saying that's pulling the family order so far out beyond the family away from the land or away from the hearth or however one wants to say it, they become dysfunctional. Away from, and this would be the big challenge that I think, I mean, you need to answer to, which is what they're pulling away from is the work that the, I think it's Robert Nisbet, you know, saying families weren't created to be together. They were created to work together. You know, that Eve is a helpmate, like she, you know, and the sons get to work and daughters get to work and this is a shared economy. And in fact, what's interesting is people will say, well, you know, the ideal is dad goes to work and makes money and they bring it home and the mom, and if they have a traditional mindset, their mom might as a stay at home mom, quote unquote with the kids, that that's sort of the ideal. But then I always point out to people who say, have you ever read Proverbs 31, you know, about the ideal wife of Proverbs and like, yeah, yeah, she's a great wife. I mean, you know, besides having servant girls and my wife's like, where are the servant girls that I get? She sets her servant girls to work early, but they describe what she does all day and she's buying fields, she's planting fields and she's overseeing the harvest of things. So the household being a place of shared work. Then I go back to the Greek word, Aristotle economy economy, or there's a Greek word that's household. Yeah, and the women were very often the heads of that household in a certain way where they were controlling the servants and they were controlling a lot of the business of the family. The fathers, of course, were the head of the household, but see, I think when you describe coming home and I can't get my teenagers doing, and a lot of dads, and I think they rightly feel enraged at the lack of gratitude and disrespect from particular teenagers. But that's another topic. That's the whole thing. The creation and perpetuating of adolescents is something we need to deal with. But why is it occurring? Because they're not sharing work. That's right. I know he has a job. And I have to see if I can find this quote from somebody who, he went from having a job to becoming a handyman. And he said, that's when I discovered the difference. And this was one of the authors in Sordin's Bay, the difference between a job and work. So he said, work is something we all need to do because it is our duty, not a punishment. God commanded us to work, and thus, whether we do it for pay out of necessity or simply to serve others, our work should be guided by him. And that is what I recognize is the real distinction between work and a job. Since our work must be guided by God, if our labor is simply led by our boss, our need for income, professional aspirations, or some other reason not tethered to God, then we're just doing a job. So I think for a lot of dads, their family only knows that they have a job. So they don't actually respect that this guy's a good leader, and he does provide way more than you need. And I'm presuming here upon a certain means, but even in our country, if he's got a job and he's taken care of his family, like he's doing well. Yeah, they're surviving. They're surviving, they're doing great. And I think not sharing that work is a big problem. So we don't get too far off from that because that's a whole another discussion. So again, why are men not bringing the skills back from business? Is that just because it's so new or are they actually in conflict with the order of the family? Because I've heard some men say, or actually it was a military guy. He said, look, I go to work and I command people. They do what I say. When I go home, it doesn't work that way. I know. They're not an army. So a family's not a business. That is true. So how does it change? How does that wisdom get over there without them trying to run? Well, kind of a simple example. Just the simplest example. I know that we're not here just to explain that detail, but let's just take your chore chart, right? I got to make a chore chart. Yeah, and we have one. And it's a chore chart for me is actually a small version of like a whole whiteboard workflow, like a mapped out work process, like a lean Six Sigma process management flow that we have hanging all over our walls here in the Tans building. But at home, I went home and tried to create a detailed chore chart. Now, it's minimalistic, but, you know, every single night, okay? So I'm answering the question of how can a dad come home from work and like contribute to the family? And part of the thing is, okay, this was a couple of years ago said, all right, Ashley, my wife, we got to make a chore chart. And so we lay out on big chalkboard in our kitchen and it has Sunday through Saturday and then the different chores that are laid out. So you got the dishes, you got the countertops, you got the kitchen floors, you got the rest of the downstairs. Man, you guys clean way better than we do. You got all that stuff that we want done every day, okay? And then you have the names of the people on different days of the week and within the grid. It's like an Excel spreadsheet on a chalkboard. And so whether it's Wednesday or whatever, every night after dinner, my little role, you know, is I'm able to kind of go and quote-unquote command the troops. I'm able to go and look at the, say, okay, it's Wednesday. Jude, Paul and Teresa, you got dishes, countertops, floors, go. Let's get it going. Start going. But I'm able to point at a system. Like I'm pointing at it as opposed to every evening making up who's going to do what, which is kind of tyrannical. You know what I mean? It's arbitrary. It's arbitrary and they feel it very quickly. And to say, oh, we're all loving Christians. We're all just going to sacrifice for each other every day is altruistic nonsense. Okay, you need systems, right? And so, I mean, the religious orders are ordered and everybody has a role to play and it's written down and there's a plan. And, you know, I think the rule of St. Benedict, which John Sr. loved, is probably the most successful business plan ever rather put together by a human being. It makes Coca-Cola and Disney look like chump change, you know? Yeah, it's still around. So that's how one tiny little itty-bitty example of how dad can come home and kind of quote-unquote command the troop, implement a system, hang it up on the wall so it's visible, a visual display, and then you can command the troops. Don't make up stuff every day. You have to have a system and then dad can easily implement that as opposed to making mom have to nudge you every night and say, help me get the chores done. Right, right. And one thing, Deming, we talked about, W. Edwards Deming was the guy who kind of helped create the Toyota way to make, you know, great processes. But his great quote was, a bad system will beat a good person every time. And I think dads come home from work and they have very little systems in place. They have bad systems in place. They have negligent systems in place. And so they're good parents and they're good kids, but the chaos of it beats them every time. If they were home all day, like in an agrarian society, it'd be different. But that's not the situation for most people. Yeah, by the way, I'm not a full-time farmer. I call it homesteading on purpose, that we're mostly providing for the goods of our home, for the needs of our home, and then selling a little bit of surplus, but displacing our need for money. But for me, I still go outside of the house and I come back and I think the temptation is to be the tyrant. I'm gonna come back in and just demand that everyone just clean this up really quick. And I could, you know, it's a whirlwind of power that I, and actually I haven't brought order. And you keep using the word order, because I had some on the other day, it's like, you know, in my American mind, I tend to think of, and this is, you know, this comes from some of our Protestant background, is laws are just suppression of freedom, that if we all were perfect and just loved, then everyone would just clean the house naturally by their own will. But your religious orders don't do that. And the fact is in other languages, law doesn't mean, it doesn't come out as being negative, because when we hear law, it's against something. But actually, usually it is the word in the classical languages, it actually means order. So we're not talking about suppressing anyone's freedom, just the fact is, we're all individual, we're all new here on this earth relatively, and there's a hierarchy to this. And what we're doing is not one person has power over another, we're putting things in order. And that's a good thing. And there's no doubt that like a little bit more of a rural life, and even if you can't be a homesteader, like I'm not, but we have gardens, we have chickens, we have goats, we have dogs, we have cats, and all this stuff, but it creates order. Like you say, you know, your cow is Lodz and Vespers, Lodz and Vespers, you know? And it creates order and structure. And so part of having those other living things that you have to care for on a daily basis, it naturally creates order. And living the artificial lifestyle that we live in modernity, it takes away from that. So having those living things that live and die, they grow, I feel like I got a lot of things on my property that grow very quickly and die very quickly, you know? And there's all this stuff that you have to pay attention to, just like you gotta milk that cow. Well, we gotta deal with the chickens every day and the goats every day, and there's always something to harvest out of our pretty substantial garden. You know, I was working at home last yesterday. I got to work remote, and I have an office outside of my backyard. My son built me a full-size shed, and it's a fully functioning office, air conditioning, electricity, everything. It's awesome. It's awesome. But I'm working and I'm watching for a couple hours in the heat of the day, I guess my 12-year-old girl, my 10-year-old girl working in the garden with wheelbarrows, and they had to clean out some of the garden boxes. I mean, they worked hard, but it just creates this. It was a beautiful scene, and then last night, they're doing chores this morning, they're getting their chores going. There's a lot of things to do, and that creates a natural rhythm, and it pulls the people back to the center of the family as opposed to everybody getting on the school bus and leaving all day long. You know, it's much more hard to manage like that. All right, so a family that, perhaps what we're describing sounds a little idyllic, and there's some people that aren't in that situation. But I think acknowledging, okay, they're not in this situation, and the situation that they are in, used a good word, is artificial. It's not a natural. The natural setting is the garden, is working the land, bringing fruits from the earth, because that's how we eat and stay alive. That's not esoteric philosophy. That's just basic reality. But most of us, we're not living in that, and kind of back to your original proposal, I think what's helpful about what you're saying is saying, fine, we live in an artificial environment, but I still have the job, and I can't escape it. I've got, I don't know, student loan debts, I've got a mortgage. This is my job. This is my career path. You've got to get in a car every morning and drive somewhere. I've got to do it, right? So this is what I'm living in. But I think you're saying, all right, fine, acknowledge that, but bring, you still have the power of bringing order. You do. And that's what they ought to be doing. Absolutely. And because I would agree, I think the temptation to come home and give the worst to your family, but I think it would actually excite a lot of men. If their family's, the relationship's not broken, they're capable of doing this. Same guys, we're going to sit down. I'm going to take the day off from my work, or I'm going to take a day off from my job to do some work with you. So when you're a farmer, you naturally know that you have to have this rhythm to your life, right? Mm-hmm. You have to rotate the crops. You have to move the pigs from this pen to that pen. You have to go collect the eggs every day, or they're going to spoil. There's a rhythm and a natural flow in order to your life. So what I'm saying is like, if you're not a farmer, okay, but understand that the way the family was made to work is with this natural rhythm and order, and that's where a lot of beauty and happiness and joy comes from. So even if you have to leave and you have to come back every day and your kids are getting on a school bus and coming back, you can still try to see, my family still needs order, rhythm, structure. We have to come together. We have to schedule certain things. But actually more so. I mean, I think the point I'm hearing from you is that if you're not living in this, you actually have to be more intentional. It's not going to happen. Far more by accident. I agree. That's what I'm saying. I mean, the cows are going to wake you up, so to speak, because you got to get up. It's going to die if you don't milk the thing, right? Right, right, right. So, but if you don't have that cow, you have to find some way to have this natural rhythm flowing through your family. It's the duty of the husband and husband and wife, you know, to figure out a way to keep this structure flowing, because the family needs that order in order to thrive. Right, and I, yeah. I guess the challenge to me, you're saying, and I agree, I think I would agree, that men that actually have a business sense, use that sense, bring it home. Don't treat your family like a family. Right, right, right. Not employees, but yeah. They're not employees. Yeah. You have 15 kids. I do. Your oldest is? My oldest is 21. The second one just got married like four days ago. That's weird. I don't even want to say. My daughter's 14. I don't want to talk about that. And the youngest one's like one. I don't know. Little. So I know there's different phases. I mean, I actually think we're breaking in phases of having a big family. You know, we have eight. Yeah, that's a big family. And we're shifting now. I'm realizing I think there's, when you have young kids, there's this where everything is just kind of ordered towards, I say, like the flesh of my wife, like her needs as in pregnancy and having an infant and then the small children. It's all sort of ordered towards them. And I'm realizing now predominance in my family, they're sort of in my domain a lot more because she still has babies that she's taken care of. But now there's this, there's these older, it's like this, I have troops now, you know. So I think I'm shifting into the phase of my family where that, what you're describing comes more important than it used to be. Whereas before I am just coming home, I'm just bouncing babies, changing diapers. We're just doing our best. But now we are emerging. We're able to do more work and manage this as a sort of an economic whole. We're going to wrap up, but what's the first thing that you think dads really should be doing to start bringing order back to the home? Well, I guess the first is recognizing that it's their primary duty. I mean, I think we outsource using more business language, right? So I can sit here at tan, I can sit in my office and I can outsource everything. I can outsource marketing, I can outsource editorial, I can outsource fulfillment and accounting and HR and just sit back and say, hey, I run a virtual company. And that might work in some certain stances. But if I want tan to be a thriving, brand centric company that really builds a beautiful thing over a long period of time, there are certain things that I have to have in-house. I cannot outsource everything. And what I'm saying is, you can't outsource structure and order to other people in your life. And I think we do that. I think we send our kids to school and say, oh, education's outsourced. Oh, and then sports, we, you know, we know sports help develop character. So we outsource that to the athletes or the coach. And we send our kids to CCD or youth group to outsource their religious development. And we outsource everything. We're trying to run like virtual families, you know? And so, no, you need to bring this home. You need to have a vision for yourself just like you would at your business or in any kind of organization. Any time a group of people come together, they should say, well, why are we here? What's the purpose of this meeting? What's the purpose of this podcast? What's the purpose of this new LLC we formed? Whatever, whatever. What's the purpose of this committee at church? What's the purpose of your family? And you can't outsource that to anybody, including your wife. You know, that's a traditional standpoint. But this is primarily your responsibility. And of course, she's the helpmate and the most important other person in this whole scenario. But develop that vision. Understand with crystal clarity what your family is for and the means by which you're going to accomplish that. That's the order and structure. And maybe it's buy a cow and get everybody to, you know, help skim the milk. And maybe it's just to have a little garden outside. Maybe it's none of the above because you're stuck in a town home in New York City. You know, I can't, well, you know, may God bless you for that. I couldn't do it. But, you know, whatever it is, there order and structure and paternal leadership and oversight over your home is totally within your control. And to think that it's not, you're selling yourself short and you're then therefore outsourcing the very paternal, God-given paternal duties. You're outsourcing that to all these other people. You know, so if you don't have, for example, this is a silly little example, but if you don't have like a digital policy for your teenagers, well, the fact is you think, well, I don't have a policy. Well, you do. Your policy is trust the internet with your child and trust your child with the internet. That's your policy, buddy. That's your system. My point is take control of these things. Man up, okay. Take responsibility for this. And I just think it's a little shortcut in our very corporate kind of lifestyle. Think about it like a business. Obviously your kids aren't employees, so you can just fire, okay? Obviously your wife is not just your CFO, your COO that you get rid of. The analogy falls short, but there's a lot of good things in that analogy. Man up and lead your family, just like you would go and lead a business if you were trying to start and run that. Yeah. All right. That's powerful, I think. Thinking about it in that way. It's not just helpful. It keeps you from being able to like, just blame everything. Wow, you know the world today. What am I supposed to do? You know what to do. What would you do if you're at work? Exactly. You would love to find a problem and fix it. All right, Connor. That's awesome. I appreciate you being on the first Till and Keep podcast. And we're clearly going to have you back. I mean, whoa, if I approve of it. Okay. Good. We'll have you back. And yeah, thanks for being here. All right. Thanks, bud. This episode of Till and Keep has been brought to you by Tan, fraternus and sword and spade. Till and Keep is a podcast that shows how the primordial command from God to Adam, to Till and Keep the garden, applies whether you toil on a farm or in a concrete jungle. Visit tillandkeeppodcast.com to subscribe and follow the show. And use coupon code Till25 to get 25% off your next order at tanbooks.com.