Building the Paideia Institute

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0:00 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Meriwether Academy podcast. This is the second episode of our podcast. I'm Warren Steury, the president of Meriwether Academy, and today I've got a very special guest. Somebody who's actually going to be flying down to Nashville here in a few weeks to speak to our academy on something that I'm very excited to have him here to speak about and also very excited to talk with him about today on this call. I've got Jason Pedicone. He's got a PhD from Princeton in the classics, and he is the president and the co-founder of the Paideia Institute, an international organization that is committed to educating people on the classics, Western civilization, and primarily ancient languages, Greek, Latin. Jason, thank you for your time this morning, and it's good to see you again. It's a pleasure. So, you know, the event that we're doing

1:00 together in a few weeks, the the topic is kind of how to build something in the cultural space. So, could you talk about where did the idea come from for you to build this what's now a a pretty large organization that's committed to something that a lot of people don't think about, which is ancient languages. You know, people kind of don't think about this day-to-day. How did this become something that you wanted to pursue and and bring to the world? Sure, yeah. So, um it it it came from an experience I had studying uh over in Italy with a uh a guy named Father Reginald Foster, who was um an amazing man. Uh he was a papal Latinist, which means his job was to write Latin for the Pope. Um he was American from Milwaukee, and um made his way, you know, in the course of his career to Rome

2:03 and and ended up rising through the ranks and becoming Latinist for he he worked for several Popes. Um Uh but he was always really committed to keeping the Latin language alive and to teaching. And he noticed the decline of quality of Latin instruction in the states. He would he would make he he would meet American high school teachers coming over to Rome and notice that they didn't know Latin that well, that their students didn't know Latin. And so he he decided to sort of mount a one-man campaign to save Latin and he set up this summer program uh which was free um that that was just a sort of like Latin boot camp in Rome where you would read Latin like 8 hours a day, 7 days a week for 2 months. And on the weekends, he would take you out to sites that were connected to Latin

3:03 literature. So, you'd be, you know, reading Cicero one day and then the next day you'd go into the forum where Cicero had actually delivered one of his orations. And that was like amazing and totally inspiring for me when I was 22. Uh he also spoke Latin actively as a living language because in the Catholic Church that was normal. He he came up in a system where he was educated in Latin, used to speak Latin at meals with his fellow monks. Uh and I didn't, you know, when I had taken Latin in college, it was always, you know, Latin's a dead language. You know, you just use it to read, you you never speak it. We very rarely read out loud the texts out loud even. So, um that experience of studying with him was just uh really transformative for me. Uh it was an incredibly inspiring program, and his relationship

4:04 to the classical humanities, uh language, literature literature, you know, how it all fit together was just really beautiful, and he he communicated this message that was like, if you learn this stuff well, you're going to under stand uh the tapestry of Western civilization, how it all fits together, and uh and it felt like you can learn how to live a good life and participate in this and be happy. So, there was a there was a there was a moral message, not that he necessarily made super explicit, but it it was just kind of implicit in the in the in the way he in the way he uh the way he talked. Um and the way he taught. So, uh that Doing that program really rocked my world when I was 22, and it inspired me. I had been thinking about going to graduate school, but after I did it, I was like, okay, I definitely want to be a classics professor. I want to go do a PhD.

5:04 Um and so I went, applied to graduate school, ended up at Princeton, um and uh you know, academia was okay, like uh elite research academia, but it sort of there were parts of it that felt a bit like a rat race. You know, there's the pressure pressure to publish or perish. Um in order to get published, you have to work on extremely specialized things, um you know, which felt not really relevant to the bigger questions of, you know, how to how to live a good life, and how does civilization work, and like, you know, the great conversation of important ideas. Like you couldn't work on stuff like that really uh to get published cuz you had to like zero in on this tiny little square. And uh that that was not that exciting for me. And I also, you know, there was such a focus on understanding the scholarly

6:05 conversation, which often was highly specialized uh that uh people didn't even necessarily learn the languages that well. They spent most of their time reading what other people were saying about ancient literature instead of like reading ancient literature and mastering mastering the languages. So, I was slightly turned off by that. Um and then uh this guy, Father Father Reggie is what we call him, Father Foster, he ended up getting sick in 2008 and he had to stop teaching that summer program. And so, the the initial impetus to found our institute was to continue the legacy of what he had already been doing for, you know, 30 years or more. Um so, it was in in that way it was like kind of a we were kind of like a uh continuing a legacy at the beginning and we didn't start completely from scratch. We found a thing that we cared about that we wanted to continue and then we carried that forward and then we, you know, we added other things to it over

7:05 time. I think that's beautiful. Uh it sounds like a very interesting man you met. Um so, you know, you kind of hit it at this, but what's funny when I was in high school, I just was told Latin was a dead language, right? I didn't think anything of it. I just dead language, dead language. But what I've heard from you and also what I've heard from guys like Alex Petkas and these other people in the classical world, which I'm starting to get interested in is that it really does change your ability to to view the world when you are able to speak these languages. It's like a new set of eyes. So, could you maybe speak to like what what happens what changes in a person's mind when they learn how to read and interact with these ancient languages that I was told were dead. Yeah. Well, first of all, clarify some terms. Latin is a dead language,

8:05 uh you know, scientifically speaking and linguistically speaking, um at least, you know, classically definitionally, that's the right terminology for it. What that means when a language is dead is it means there's not an active community of native speakers who are sort of learning it from their parents and speaking it, you know, naturally in the in the way that living languages are transmitted like English or French or Spanish. Like those are There are little babies who live in houses where people speak those languages and they grow up, you know, imbibing them and they become native speakers. Latin is not like that. Latin Latin died out and there are people who speak Latin, I'm one of them, but but those of us who do that kind of do that for fun later in life. We we we do it because we think it has value. Um so, that's what being a a dead language means. Now, but that doesn't mean that like the way the language is taught has to be

9:05 dead and it it it it doesn't mean that the um you know, the culture and the community around interacting with the language should be moribund, which unfortunately in many cases it is. Um so, you know, for me, well, there's a couple There's a couple things. One is just that when you are actively producing a language yourself and and hearing it, it's just much much easier to learn it, right? Like languages are designed to be spoken and experienced. Uh that's the word language derives from the the word lingua, which means tongue, you know? Like, you're supposed to be using your mouth for these things. They're tools that that that require the use of the mouth. So, the learning process is just better when you're when you're speaking, when you're hearing, it you know, that's how your brain is wired. Um but then like sort of by extension, uh

10:05 developing what I what you might call a personal relationship with the language and the literature, it's just it's just easier, I've found, if you um if you if you if you can speak a little bit. And that doesn't mean you have to be able to like orate like Cicero, but you know, put a sentence together, fool around, say it out loud, and and and also just like makes the learning experience more fun and dynamic, right? So, that um that was my initial interest in it. I'm all I also happen to be like a a pretty extroverted person. I love talking to other people. I've learned a lot of modern languages as well. And uh you know, the process of communicating with somebody from another culture, you know, in in person, live, extemporaneously is just really inspiring. So, uh to me it's just always made sense to do that with with with the languages as well. Um and then, you know, you get like along with that

11:06 uh close connection, you get all the benefits of the historical and literary patrimony. You know, like suddenly you're sort of fluent in the lingua franca, as it were, of the creation of democracy, uh the creation of philosophy, uh the creation and propagation, you might say, of democracy, philosophy, uh history, you know, all these core foundational ideas um that our society is built on were originally expressed and thought through in this idiom. So, if you internalize that and build a personal relationship with it, you just can't help but become more philosophical, more historically informed. Um so, it's like a bonus aspect of of learning the classics. Like, you're a better citizen, you're a more thoughtful person, you have a better relationship to like civic order, political philosophy. It's

12:06 just It just happens naturally. So, that's like another big benefit. When did Latin start to fall out of our education system? You know, I know that it was very popular for a long time. It seems like maybe it was the early 20th century when it really kind of took a tailspin. Do you know much about when that kind of dropped off? Yeah, I I looked into this once. So, um it you know, originally Greek and Latin were at the core and the foundation of the American educational project. Um you know, if you look at the admissions exam to Harvard University in like, you know, 1700, it was just all classics. You know, it was like, "Can you read the Bible in Greek? Can you translate Cicero?" Um That faded away uh over time. Uh you know, actually um the

13:07 It's It's funny. You know, one of the pivotal moments for this was when the Russians beat us to space with Sputnik. Um the American government like freaked out, you know, kind of like as a as a result of the early early stages or I guess uh mid stages of the Cold War after World War II, and they were like, "We have to really invest in science, technology, engineering, and um they put a major emphasis on STEM, and they actually passed policy that made funding available for for STEM projects, and interestingly, for modern languages, but explicitly not for Greek and Latin. Because Greek and Latin were viewed as languages that were not relevant for, you know, diplomacy or international relations, um and so that the humanities in general, and Greek and Latin with

14:08 them, kind of like were deprioritized nationally. Um and and and and and if you sort of trace the beginning of the end, uh you know, now it's something like somewhere between one and one in 10 and one in 20 American high schools has a formal Latin program. Uh it used to be like 50% of them did or more. It it it really started there, actually. So, it was this uh obsession with international competition and a fear that uh we would fall behind that that led to policy that began the decline of of the teaching of these languages. Mhm. Fascinating. You know, one of the things that uh I've kind of been advertising our dinner that we're doing in a few weeks is that it's good for an entrepreneur or for a founder, somebody who wants to create a project in the cultural space.

15:09 Um you know, what would you tell to somebody, or maybe you can just speak to your own journey creating this business that's you know, it's not like um you're not building houses, or it's it's not as concrete as other business models. It's more aspirational. It's more cultural. How how was entering this different for you and what were some of the things that you had to figure out early on to make it successful? Yeah, so um it's funny like when I got into it the first the first product that we sold was um summer programs over in Italy and Greece for college students and graduate students and they were very high academic level immersion programs in Latin and Ancient Greek. And uh you know, I was really just focused on trying to deliver educational experiences that would be transformative for students in the same way studying

16:09 with Father Foster had been for me. And we were very successful in you know, delivering a great experience for the students who came. They had a good time. They went back more excited about classics. A lot of them, you know, ended up changing their majors or like declaring a major in classics as a direct result of studying in our program. Um and that was great, but there was no profit really. Uh there you know, we basically broke even and if you really counted the number of hours we put into it, we didn't break even. Um so we had to figure out how to uh do what we loved, but also find a real market that could help support us. And uh that turned out to be uh well well, on the one hand philanthropy. Like I had to get serious about fundraising

17:10 and start bringing in you know, convincing people that it was worth supporting us to do this uh at a high level enough to you know basically pay us salaries so that we could live and support ourselves. And then the other was realizing that we could help we could we could use the experience that we developed running the summer programs ourselves to help other institutions set up similar programs for their students. And so that eventually developed into like a what you might call a B2B product like a business-to-business logistics and travel support finding a business-to-business market. Yeah, so we started working with high schools and universities to set up travel programs for them and the combination of you know raising money and making money eventually became enough to float us. It also it also led to us developing new

18:11 products that were slightly less idealistic but well in in some ways that the the products we developed to help raise money shifted our focus in in a different directions. We started working with low-income elementary school kids and bring like starting after-school classics programs there because the donors like what we were doing but they wanted to see more of a like direct impact on you know vulnerable people not just giving Ivy League college kids nice summer experiences. And that was great and we were excited to do that so we expanded in that direction and then at the same time we started um we we we basically you know there's a uh like a sort of I don't know. And it's it's a known thing that learning Latin and ancient Greek improves literacy and reading because like 80% of the English language derives from either Latin or Greek. And especially higher level literacy words

19:12 like for it's easy to see like the word water, right? Water derives from German. Uh it's a low-level register word, but like aquatics, you know, or aquarium, these harder words for, you know, like kids are learning and they need to learn to sort of reach the next levels of literacy, those all come from uh Greek and Latin. Hydration comes from the Greek word for water, you know? So, uh yeah, we we set up a an after-school literacy program that just went in and taught the basics of Greek and Latin, um you know, uh Greek and Latin vocabulary, Greek and Roman history and culture to like fourth through sixth graders. And And we And we focused on doing it in like lower-income communities where they probably wouldn't ever get a chance to experience Latin because Also, it's another interesting thing about like the heat map of classics in America. Uh it's basically always in the rich communities where there are Latin programs. So, so that was that was great

20:12 and it took us in a totally different direction. I had to come down a bit off my pedestal, you know, my Ivy League pedestal and start thinking about meeting people where they were, thinking about like what do donors care about? What do they really want to fund? They want to help people who are less fortunate than them, right? So, that created a whole new product line. And then, you know, similar story on the B2B side. You know, when you're working with a high school to bring 30 kids to Greece for a week, like yeah, they want to do some classics, but they're also like really concerned about just making sure everybody's safe, that the food is good, that the like transportation is smooth. So, you just shift your focus and you develop in that way. But, uh it was a kind of organic. And what were some of the things that you learned about yourself going through this this journey of entrepreneurship of of starting this thing? I'm sure that the the man you are now is very different from the man who who first started this. What was it? 15 or so years ago? Something like that. So, how

21:13 how were how were some of the the things in yourself uh developing through this process? Yeah, it's a great question um and one I think about a lot, you know, you're you're formed by a business. You're formed by your experience um and you're constantly humbled by it, right? Because uh inevitably you have like all humans, you have strength and weaknesses and as the business grows and expands, you're going to run up against uh some of those weaknesses and then you, you know, the people who succeed find ways to transcend those weaknesses either by growing and developing or crucially by hiring other people who are better at those things, right? So, very early on, I'm a very uh sort of creative, somewhat scattered person. I like to try a million different projects. I'm very I get very enthusiastic about an idea and and drive

22:14 hard at it to try to test it out, uh but then I'll lose interest um and, you know, get interested in the next shiny thing. And so, that's a it's it's both a strength and uh a liability if if you're trying to found something, right? Uh because that sort of creativity, that impulse at the beginning is what you need to get something off the ground. You need you you're running on enthusiasm at the beginning, but, you know, makes you like bad at like keeping the books and like, you know, all of the organizational stuff that's necessary, processes, you know, processes are super important, setting up structures to manage things. I was bad at that. I wasn't interested in it, you know, and that became clear early on. Luckily, my co-founder was great at that stuff. He was um you know, I was like the lead guitar, he was the rhythm guitar. And that was I mean with the business we would never have succeeded had it not been for that partnership at the beginning. And we had a great friendship

23:14 and really understood that we each had these strengths and weaknesses. We would call each other out when necessary and I think like we both really respected the other person. So I mean getting a good co-founder who complements your your strength is like probably the most important thing you can do to get a business off the ground. Or if it's not going to be a co-founder, you know, your first employee hire is got to be somebody who complements your abilities. Yeah. Yeah, that's that's good advice. Where do you see your project going? I mean what what does your institute look like another 15 years from now? And what type of impact is it making on culture? Oh man, what does society look like 15 years from now? So I've started several businesses over the past couple of years. I have a I have the Paideia Institute which I'm the non-profit I'm still running. I have a tutoring and advising company which is

24:16 kind of like connected to Paideia but it's a for-profit where I help you know, high school high school students typically you know, with the college admissions process and expanding their interesting classics get helping them find more opportunities. And then I have a web web design and software development consulting practice which is more recent. And I've been uh very interested in software AI I am the Paideia's big project right now is building basically online apps to learn Greek and Latin because we realized the best way to reach students at schools that are probably never going to have a classics program is to let them access that on their own online if they're interested. And you know, that that was a five-year process of of developing that stuff and building it out, over which time I uh I basically like retrained as a software developer. Um and I rely a lot

25:16 on AI for that, but I've also built out quite a number of apps and systems now both for our own organization and other organizations. So, I am paying paying very close attention to what's going on in the technology space. Um I am cautiously optimistic about what AI and tech in general is going to do for our society even though there are a lot of caveats on that statement and you have to be really careful and mindful about how you roll it out, particularly in educational contexts. But um you know, just watching what's going on, reading uh engineering newsletters, watching how technology's developing, I think that we are I think that like AI is the biggest change that our society is going to underg- underg- going to undergo in a long time and it's going to it's going to reshape the economy and um what people do in the economy in like

26:18 massive ways soon, you know, in in in the next in the in the next 15 years. So, what are the upshots of that? Well, one, uh I think people are going to have a lot more leisure. Uh like a lot of stuff is going to get automated. Knowledge work is already being automated at a very high level. Uh and we're just it's just at the beginning of that. We're hearing about layoffs in tech companies, massive layoffs. Uh like Square was the most famous one. Meta just laid off like 10,000 people. Some of this is to free up cash to invest in AI, but a lot of it, and I know this as a software developer, is because you just don't need as many people to to build software products as you used to. And that's going to trickle through society. Um there's going to be a lot more software um motivate um automating a lot more processes through all sorts of organizations, which is going to free up

27:18 human time. Now, we as a society have to figure out how to like redistribute resources or come up with like new new projects for people to work on. Um but I think the arts and leisure and culture space is going to explode over the next 15 years because uh one of the great things about how these changes in in software means that like it's easier to start new companies, there's a lower barrier to entry, and you can build stuff that never used to exist before. Uh and so I think the combination of people working less and it being easier to create new things is going to create a new sort of class of um economic activity that's tied less to like, you know, the immediate needs, like covering Maslow's hierarchy of needs for humanity, you know, like uh you know, moving stuff around, generating uh food, shelter, things like that. So, I think there'll be lots of opportunities for arts and culture

28:19 stuff. And I think education is going to change in that direction. I think we're going to we're going to I I one podcaster I listen to calls it the revenge of the humanities, which I which I kind of like. Uh I think there's going to be a lot of opportunities to build stuff out to help humanity cope with this new reality, which is that none of us have to work as much as we used to, and there's a lot more time for us to engage with, you know, beautiful cultural stuff, art, literature, music, um you know, yoga, hiking, sports. Like there's just going to be a renaissance of stuff like that for humanity. And the paradigm of success means I work 80 hours a week at an investment bank and I make a bunch of money and have a big house is going to is going to change, um which I think is is great. I also think that the American psyche is going to struggle

29:19 to adapt to this new future because we have been trained that professional success and also making money are like the meaning of life. And uh like our whole system is kind of oriented around that. And if that no longer is true north in human society, it's going to take some it's going to take some adjustment. Man, that's so fascinating and it's certainly the most optimistic explanation that I've heard. Which is great. I'm really with it. You know, it makes me think of I can't recall um where I read this, but it was talking about how a lot of the ancient artistic uh revolutions happened because a lot of the busy work was just being taken care of by slaves and servants. So like the minds were freed up to engage in these higher things. Right. So

30:19 as I hear you describe this, I'm I'm also optimistic. I think that that is a really good way to look at it. As long as we don't amuse ourselves to death, as Neil Postman said. Yeah, there's a there's a couple important questions that have to be answered along the way. One is like how do we prevent How do How do we prevent just all wealth from flowing to the people who've created this technology, which is a real question that I don't think has been answered yet. Um uh An- Another is this sort of uh you know, like how do we prevent the just sort of future of Netflix and chill for everyone all the time. Like just sit there pushing buttons so that, you know, low-quality food is delivered to us looking at our phones or TVs to get low-quality entertainment um and just becoming depressed and disconnected from each other. I think that's a real risk, too. So, that's why I think

31:19 uh it's important for entrepreneurs right now to step up and be part of preventing that from happening. You know, the the the great companies of the future are not going to maybe like create billionaires uh as much as just like, you know, help society. You know, the the There should be a reorientation. Like when everybody's needs are getting met by automation, like your your focus and your duty as somebody who has entrepreneurial drive and, you know, is privileged enough to be born with the wherewithal to do it, like work on work on helping humanity make this transition. Yeah, you know, I think that one of the character traits that is is not natural and it's learned and it's taught and it's a It's a bullwark against all of this scrolling on Instagram and Netflixing and chill for the rest of your life is

32:19 the simple thirst for knowledge and the desire to learn. Like I found that when I activated that in my late teenage years, my early 20s, my entire life changed. And the The that come to our school, our boy school, turning on that spark as quickly as possible to where you take a human and they now are self-driven to seek out knowledge for themselves. I think that that is one of the greatest gifts that we can give to other people. Um and I also think that that's one of the greatest shields against this like total jellification of your life is this this fire for knowledge, the fire to learn. It gives you a reason to not sit and watch YouTube all night. And I think that's what you do that's what you guys are doing with your institute. I think that that's

33:19 certainly something that you're awakening in people and I think it's really commendable. Yeah. So, you know, real quick, we've got our dinner here in a few weeks and we're going to get a bunch of guys a gentleman event. We're going to get a bunch of guys in a room and you're going to talk about your project. We're going to have wine, we're going to have a meal, everybody's going to get a get a chance to speak on their projects. Who do you think should come to this this event that we're hosting? What type of guy would benefit the most from what you plan on sharing with the room? Yeah, I would say anybody who has an idea that they'd like to get off the ground uh in any in any space at all. Could be a for-profit idea, it could be a non-profit idea. But in particular, if you're interested in, you know, starting something that gives back to your community, whatever that community is. Uh you want to you want to learn how to raise money, how to like

34:21 get something going, bootstrap something into existence, what are the biggest risks, uh and how to overcome them. Uh anybody who's interested in starting something, I think would probably be interested in what I'm going to have to say. Uh Also, people who are interested in the humanities, the future of the humanities, and and and also software development, AI, and the overlap between that world and, you know, humanistic stuff. That's that's the kind of stuff that I'm interested in and that I'm going to be talking about. Awesome. And if somebody wanted to find you online or find you on Instagram, could you let them know what they Yep. Definitely, yeah. http://www.paideia institute.org. Just Google Paideia Institute. I'm on there. There's a contact form. We'd love to, you know, get you involved. You can You can come to us with no knowledge of Latin or Greek at all, only an interest to learn. We have very affordable online stuff ready to get you going and, you know,

35:22 get you into the community and make you part of this world. So, we'd love to have anybody who's interested. Awesome. Well, Jason, thank you for your time. And I will see you in a few weeks in Nashville. I'm very much looking forward. Thank you, Warren.