Reliance College

08/31/2026

⏳ Applications close September 25.

AI Proof U™ is ten weeks that change how you think. It starts with a three-day intensive in Chicago on October 2, where you'll dig into self-knowledge, leadership, and judgment in an AI-driven world. Then six online seminars, from decision-making to economics to entrepreneurship. Then you come back to Chicago and present your own work.

No lectures to sit through. Socratic dialogue, great texts, and real projects, with a Professional Certificate at the end.

If you've been thinking about it, this is the week to act.

APPLY NOW 👉

AI Proof U™  ·  A Project of Reliance College

08/28/2026

Can one week actually change how you think and how you listen?

Adeline says yes. A rising sophomore at Columbia, she spent the Great Connections Seminar debating Mises over dinner she helped cook, learning from a friend who listened so well it taught her how to listen, and having conversations that required more courage than she usually encounters.

08/27/2026

Nineteen students came to the 17th Great Connections Summer Seminar at the end of July. Phoenix to Baton Rouge, and Colombia, Armenia and Australia.

It was our largest cohort in some years and the most geographically and intellectually diverse group we have had.

Seven of them have already told us they want to come back next summer and bring their friends.

One theme for the whole week: Reason and Love. Aristotle, Emily Dickinson, Mises, Tocqueville, Ortega y Gasset, and a black and white film from 1950 that nobody expected to like.

More from the week over the next few weeks, including the students in their own words.

08/27/2026

Degrees are common. Tools are everywhere. Judgment is rare.

That's the skill AI Proof U™ was built to train. Over ten weeks, you'll reason from first principles through great texts, from Aristotle to The Wealth of Nations, practice making decisions under uncertainty, and learn to communicate them with clarity and persuasion.

The format: a three-day in-person intensive in Chicago (October 2 to 4), six weekly online seminars, and an in-person capstone where you present your own work. You'll finish with a Professional Certificate and something rarer: a trained mind.

The Collaborative Socratic Practice behind the program has produced measured cognitive skill gains of 30 to over 80 percent in longitudinal studies.

🗓️ October cohort starts October 2
⏳ Applications close September 25

APPLY TODAY 👉

AI Proof U™  ·  A Project of Reliance College

08/26/2026

The Great Connections Alumni Network has moved to WhatsApp.

We ran it on Discord from April. It worked, but most alumni are already on WhatsApp, and a conversation is easier to keep going where people already are.

There is a main group for announcements plus three you can opt into: General Dialogue, Worth-Sharing, and Professional & Projects. That last one is for careers and the work people are building, which is what alumni asked for most when we surveyed them in February.

Open to anyone who has done a Great Connections seminar, any year. Isabel Moino, class of 2015, is hosting.

Join here:

08/26/2026

🧠 Would you turn down Brown University for a job at Palantir?

That's what 18-year-old Matteo Zanini did.

Instead of heading to an Ivy League campus on a full-ride scholarship, he joined Palantir's new Meritocracy Fellowship, a program created on CEO Alex Karp's conviction that "college is broken."

The fellowship didn't start with coding.

It began with a four-week seminar on the foundations of the West, U.S. history, and leadership, featuring readings from Frederick Douglass, Lincoln, and Churchill, before fellows ever touched a line of code.

Why would one of the world's most advanced tech companies open its training with philosophy and history?

Because even in Silicon Valley, they've recognized something traditional universities have lost:

The most valuable skill in the modern world isn't technical knowledge. It's judgment.

At Reliance College, that's the foundation of our approach.

We pair the Great Books with modern science, entrepreneurship, and collaborative Socratic dialogue to teach students how to think independently, reason clearly, and act on principle.

Our aim isn't to produce specialists who memorize answers, but leaders who can ask the right questions.

In an age when AI can generate text, summarize data, and automate work, what still matters is discernment, the ability to decide what's worth doing and why.

That's why Palantir's fellows studied the same questions we explore every day:

What is the West?

What virtues sustain a free society?

What does it mean to lead responsibly?

If even high-tech firms are rediscovering the humanities to train better thinkers, perhaps the real revolution in education won't be in abandoning college, but in re-imagining it.

That's what we're building at Reliance College: a place where freedom, reason, and moral courage are not afterthoughts, but the core of higher learning.

08/26/2026

Warren Buffett's annual letters to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders are legendary, not for complex jargon, but for their clarity and candor.

Buffett understands that trust is built through transparency and that the best leaders don't just make smart decisions. They explain them well.

His writing transforms complex financial concepts into simple, engaging insights that anyone can understand.

The ability to think clearly and communicate effectively is one of the most undervalued skills in business.

Buffett has often said that improving communication skills, especially public speaking and writing, is the best investment you can make.

He even took a Dale Carnegie course to overcome his fear of public speaking, calling it one of the most valuable things he ever did.

"The one easy way to become worth 50 percent more than you are now is to hone your communication skills, both written and verbal."

At Reliance College, we train students in persuasive writing, critical thinking, and philosophical reasoning, because great ideas are only as powerful as your ability to articulate them.

08/25/2026

"You don't need to be well versed in Aristotle or Plato before you come here. It's less about coming in with a predetermined amount of knowledge, it's discussing what could be."

Reese Gebauer came from St. Louis for her first Great Connections Seminar as a biology student who had never read Aristotle or Plato. Nineteen pages of tiny print will put anyone off. What she found is a room where nobody is expected to arrive holding the answer, and where the discussion keeps going out into the hallway, at lunch, on the smoothie run.

08/25/2026

Ask most people what makes an entrepreneur and you'll hear capital, connections, or nerve. Economist Israel Kirzner had a different answer: what he called "entrepreneurial alertness".

Kirzner taught at NYU for decades and studied under Ludwig von Mises. In his book Competition and Entrepreneurship, he argued that markets move because somebody notices what everyone else walked past. The product nobody is selling. The price that's one dollar in one market and two in another.

That noticing is the whole job, and it's why Kirzner said entrepreneurship doesn't necessarily require starting capital at all. You can borrow money. You can't borrow the discovery.

Set that next to AI. AI is extremely good at the other kind of thinking, the calculating and optimizing inside a problem somebody else already defined. It doesn't notice that the premise itself is wrong. It doesn't see the gap no dataset describes, because the gap hasn't happened yet.

Calculation is getting cheap. Discovery is getting expensive.

AI Proof U™ is Reliance College's 10-week hybrid certificate for people who plan to be on the right side of that. You practice independent judgment live, in Collaborative Socratic Discussion. Nobody lectures you about critical thinking. You do it out loud, with sharp people pushing back.

Our first cohort has finished. The next one begins October 2, 2026. Enrollment is $2,500, payable in installments, a fraction of one semester at most colleges. Limited scholarships available.

08/25/2026

Can one week change how a student sees herself?

18-year old Lucy came to the Great Connections Seminar for the conversations and left with something she didn't expect: the freedom of doing things on her own. Cooking her own meals. Going into the city by herself. Trying new things instead of hanging back waiting for someone to come along.

👀 Stay tuned for our announcement on the 2027 Great Connections Seminar and next year's topic.