ABOUT US
FIND YOUR VOICE IN THE GREAT CONVERSATION
The Great Conversation
"Reading great books is like eavesdropping on the conversation of the greatest minds." - Mortimer Adler
Mortimer Adler, American philosopher and educator.
What is the Great Conversation?
Picture a dinner party across centuries. Plato and Kant debate whether goodness exists beyond mind. Einstein sketches relativity on napkins while Aristotle challenges him, mapping causality in wine stains. Augustine and Nietzsche clash over God and meaning, until Wittgenstein cuts in: "You're trapped in language games." This isn't fantasy. It's the Great Conversation. Your seat is waiting.
Why Join?
Your thoughts have ancestors. Look at that cerulean blue sweater in The Devil Wears Prada. Your ideas about love? That's Sappho and Petrarch echoing through time. Your sense of right and wrong? Mencius and Aquinas shaped that. Your grasp of truth? That's Popper challenging Plato - just ask George Soros, whose theory of reflexivity began with reading The Open Society.
Don’t Be Basic.
Your mind gets shaped by something - feeds, trends, whatever's in the air. That's basic: letting random influences mold your thoughts. Real individuality? Cultivate your influences. Steve Jobs was known to have read and been influenced by Suzuki’s “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind,” while reimagining technology. Fukuyama found Hegel's dialectic unfolding in modern democracy. Today's pioneering minds stand on carefully chosen shoulders. Great conversations make great conductors.
Start as a student, become a teacher.
Peter Thiel draws from Girard's mimetic theory to decode competition. Martin Luther King Jr. studied Thoreau's civil disobedience before transforming civil rights. Simone Weil's study of ancient Greek revealed new ways to think about labor and attention. Great ideas demand sharing - you become not just a vessel of wisdom but a source.
Ideas ignite ideas.
One question sparks another. Start with Plato on justice, find Heidegger questioning technology, suddenly see Hannah Arendt illuminating power in the digital age. These aren't just academic connections - they're lightning strikes that light up our world.
Innovation needs inheritance.
Tomorrow's revolution won't come from ignoring the past but from channeling it. Before Heisenberg and Bohr could reimagine physics, they mastered Newton and Maxwell. The founders of Google drew from library science to organize the internet. Future breakthroughs await those who conduct the current of past wisdom.
A single lightning bolt arcs through human history.
Every breakthrough, every revolution in thought surges in this eternal current. Like lightning, ideas fork, branch, illuminate unexpected connections. Miss this conversation and you're left with shadows: context-free takes, algorithm-driven opinions, rootless thoughts.
Meet the Team
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Bobby George
CEO
PhD in Philosophy; co-founder of the first accredited Montessori in South Dakota; co-founder and CEO of Montessorium, an educational app company acquired by Higher Ground Education; and, design and product leader at Microsoft Flip, which scaled to over 100M educators, students and families.
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Alex Jakubowski
COO
Classics major; serial entrepreneur with 3 successful ventures; led $18M+ in fundraising across social impact and for-profit companies; award-winning educator and founder of study abroad organization acquired by top 10 global humanitarian group; COO at Switch, scaling VC-backed payments startup to 50,000+ users; directed $12M emergency PPE supply chain initiative during COVID-19 crisis.
Learn like an Aristocrat.
The contemplation of great ideas has typically been reserved for the privileged few. Lightning seeks to change that.
Alexander the Great and Aristotle.
In our search for modern meaning, we’ve lost sight of the Great Conversation.
Our universities have become factories of credentials, churning out degrees while leaving curiosity and critical thinking behind. Even at elite institutions, our youth no longer immerse themselves in books. Professors, caught in the grind of endless publishing, speak only to echo chambers, retreating into ideological silos while life’s profound questions go unanswered.
The technology meant to save us has only deepened our emptiness. Language apps teach us how to order coffee but not how to appreciate Don Quixote. We binge on content that neither challenges nor nourishes us. Leisure has been hijacked by an economy of endless scrolling and addictive consumerism.
A generation searches for meaning in a marketplace flooded with shallow solutions. While modern approaches to wellbeing have their place, they often miss the deeper dimensions of human flourishing. The great books that once shaped civilizations gather dust as we trade depth for disposable feeds. We've lost the common language that once united us in meaningful conversations.
I was born into a tradition that offers another way. In Judaism, learning is not just a path to knowledge but a spiritual practice, one so essential that each day begins with a blessing of gratitude for the obligation to study. We approach texts not as puzzles to solve but as timeless dialogues to enter.
In our tradition, multiple interpretations coexist, each holding a shard of truth. For thousands of years, we've survived exile by making our home in the enduring power of great conversation. This approach moved me so deeply that I chose to become both a Rabbi and a Doctor of Theology.
This wisdom tradition offers a path through our modern crisis. What if we approached every text with the reverence of a sacred scroll? What if our technology, rather than distracting us, deepened our engagement with what matters?
Artificial intelligence provides an extraordinary opportunity to breathe new life into the classics. But this demands a shift in how we view learning—not as passive consumption but as active soul-craft, not as the transfer of information but as a journey of transformation.
This is why I founded Lightning. I envision a future where great books are not merely assigned but encountered as companions. Where timeless questions become living conversations, where ancient wisdom speaks to contemporary life, where each person discovers their own voice in dialogue with the past. A future where the rigor of academia meets the wisdom of timeless traditions—freed from the confines of ivory towers and unyielding dogma.
Learning is a practice that can change your life. The history of thought is not simply a catalogue of theories that are either right or wrong, but a great conversation, one that you can join. Your intellectual DNA contains traces of the conversations that have shaped your inner and outer world. By decoding it, you discover not just who you are, but who you can become.
— Zohar Atkins, Founder
Join the Discord to engage in conversation on topics that matter to you.
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The Leadership Department integrates the study of Government, Sociology, Psychology, Law, and History to form a comprehensive, interdisciplinary approach to understanding authority, influence, and social structures.
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The Alchemy Department is a convergence point for the disciplines of Architecture, Decorative Arts, and the Mechanical Arts.
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The Prosper Department represents a confluence of rigorous analytical frameworks and the evolving dynamics of economic inquiry.
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The Muses Department encompasses the interdisciplinary domains of Literature, Poetry, Performing Arts, Fine Arts, and Mythology, each dedicated to the transformative exploration of human expression and cultural heritage.
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The Think Department brings together Anthropology, Philosophy, and Religion, fostering rigorous exploration of human thought, belief, and culture.
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The Eureka Department stands as a confluence of scientific inquiry and technical precision, encompassing the fields of Biology, Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, and Applied Science.