The Socrates Program is excited to host our Winter Seminars this February 5th-8th in Aspen, CO. Seminar tuition is $3,000. Tuition includes all meals and seminar participation. Limited scholarships are available by application here. Registration is open. Secure your spot now!

Your seminar will be broken up into 3 sessions from 2:00 pm to 6:00 pm on Saturday and Sunday, and 8:00 am to 12:00 pm on Monday.

Seminars are text-based collaborative dialogues - curated readings will be distributed digitally in advance.

One of the three seminars have been announced. Check back for the final topic and moderator!

Winter 2027 Seminars:

Is Human Connection Worth Fighting For?

Work has always been relational -- and whether you lead a team, collaborate across functions, or simply have to get things done alongside other human beings, you know how much relationships shape everything else. But right now, something is shifting. As AI takes over more of our tasks, from drafting our emails, summarizing our meetings, to analyzing our data, we are being quietly relieved of the very moments that used to create connection. The awkward conversation. The honest feedback that someone needed to hear. The disagreement that, when handled well, leaves a team stronger than before.

And yet: people remain as complicated as ever. We still have colleagues who undermine us, managers who make us feel small, and teams that can't seem to get out of their own way. We still avoid hard conversations, smooth over tensions that deserve to be named, and mistake politeness for trust. The relationships that make work meaningful -- and make teams perform -- are not getting easier. If anything, they're getting harder to prioritize.

So what does it take to thrive at work when relationships feel this messy? And in an age when AI promises to smooth over friction, why might we actually want to preserve it? These questions sit at the heart of what it means to work alongside other human beings, and they have never been more pressing than now, when the alternative to doing this work is so readily available. How we answer them may determine not just how well our teams perform, but whether we preserve something essential about what it means to work together at all.

Together, we'll explore:

• When a colleague's behavior makes work feel impossible, where do we even begin?
• When working with others feels like the hardest part of the job, how do we still find a way to do our best work together?
• How do we speak honestly at work without blowing up the relationships we depend on?
• What do we lose when we outsource the friction of human relationships to technology -- and what might we gain by leaning into it instead?
• Can conflict actually make a team stronger? And if so, what separates productive tension from the kind that just does damage?
• What would it mean to have a real relationship strategy -- not just an operations strategy or an AI strategy -- and how would that change how we lead?
• In a workplace increasingly shaped by algorithms, what is the irreplaceable work that only humans can do -- and are we doing it?

This is not a seminar about being nice. It's about being honest, with yourself, with your colleagues, and about what it actually takes to build something meaningful together. The cost of getting this wrong isn't just a dysfunctional team. It's the slow erosion of the trust, candor, and connection that make work, and us, fully human. Because the teams that thrive are not the ones that avoid the mess. They're the ones that learn to find the magic in it.

Moderator: Amy Gallo is the best-selling author of Getting Along: How to Work with Anyone (Even Difficult People) and the HBR Guide to Dealing with Conflict, a how-to book about handling conflict professionally and productively. She is a workplace expert who frequently writes and speaks about gender, interpersonal dynamics, difficult conversations, feedback, and effective communication. She works with individuals, teams, and organizations around the world to help them collaborate, improve how they communicate, and transform their organizational culture to support dissent and debate. 

How Long Should We Live?

For as long as humans have understood that life ends, we have searched for ways to extend it. Today, that ancient pursuit is entering a new era. Advances in medicine, biotechnology, genetics, regenerative medicine, biohacking, and artificial intelligence are raising the possibility that we may not simply treat disease, but conquer aging itself.

What happens if we succeed?

A world in which people routinely live healthy lives to 120, 150, or longer change far more than medicine. It could fundamentally reorganize the architecture of human life. Childhood, education, work, marriage, parenthood, retirement, and old age have developed around assumptions about how long we live. If those assumptions change, do our existing stages of life simply become longer, or do entirely new ones emerge? Could we have multiple careers, families, periods of education, and reinvention? What would it mean to be “middle-aged” in a 200-year life? And, can our societies afford the costs of it?

Longer lives could also change our relationship to the future. Human beings and the institutions we build are often criticized for thinking in years rather than generations. But what if the distant future were no longer someone else’s future? Would we take issues more seriously if we expected to personally experience the world of 2150? Would leaders invest differently in infrastructure, institutions, scientific research, or other projects whose benefits might take a century to realize? Could longer lives expand our capacity to undertake work that exceeds the boundaries of a conventional lifetime?

Or might the opposite occur? More time could mean more opportunity to accumulate wealth, hold onto power, consume resources, and deepen existing divisions. Medical breakthroughs have never been distributed equally. If radical longevity is expensive, access to additional decades of healthy life could become one of the most consequential inequalities of all: a world in which wealth can buy not simply a better life, but more of it.

This Socrates seminar will examine longevity through the lenses of medicine and public health while exploring its implications for technology, inequality, family, work, leadership, and our obligations to future generations. 

Together, we will ask:

• What is the purpose of medicine: to prevent disease, extend health, extend life, or ultimately overcome aging itself?
• If humans live dramatically longer, how might we reinvent the stages and purpose of a human life?
• Would longer lives make us more willing to invest in institutions, relationships, and challenges that unfold across generations?
• What happens to society if additional years of healthy life are available to some people, communities, or nations before others?
• And if we gain unprecedented power over how long we live, how should we decide how long is long enough and who should make those decisions?

Moderator: Dr. Ashwin Vasan is a physician, epidemiologist, and health leader. He is a Senior Fellow in Health Policy & Global Affairs at Yale University. Previously, Dr. Vasan served as the 44th New York City Health Commissioner from Jan 2022-2025. During Dr. Vasan’s tenure, while leading the city out of the pandemic and confronting new challenges including the 2022 mpox outbreak, he reshaped and reoriented the city’s public health system to take on the challenge of falling life expectancy, embodied in their signature initiative HealthyNYC which aims for healthier, longer lives for all New Yorkers, with a focus on closing inequities.