Aspen Ideas Festival kicks off with talks and seminars on wide ranging topics

Aspen Ideas Festival begins this week, bringing more than 4,000 people across the Aspen Institute campus over the course of the week.

The weeklong Ideas festival begins in earnest on Wednesday, June 25 and goes through Tuesday, July 1. It will feature prominent journalists, actors, politicians, artists, scientists and more. Tickets for Aspen Ideas are sold out, with only limited tickets available for select evening events.

The event, which started in 2005, is in its 21st year. Graham Veysey, executive director and executive producer of the Aspen Ideas Festival, has been involved for 20 of those festivals. 

“It’s also the most fulfilling (time), because you see what really takes 18 months to plan come to fruition,” said Veysey of the 2025 festival. “We’ve got a dynamite team, some of the most creative people, and we’ve got an agenda for the 2025 festival that is really unparalleled.”

This year’s Ideas agenda is “truly 360-degrees” in scope, according to Veysey. The talks range from debates about foreign policy featuring officials from past democratic and republican administrations, workshops on art, discussions on loss, and more. 

Many of these conversations will be moderated by mainstream journalists who are intimately familiar with the discussion topics they are moderating. 

Fareed Zakaria, a CNN journalist covering international affairs, will be moderating a discussion on foreign policy with former U.N. Ambassadors John Bolton and Susan Rice. Kate Crawford, senior researcher at Microsoft Research will be on a panel discussing AI. A roundtable on play will feature Heidi Erwin, the senior game designer at the New York Times — where she led design on Connections — and others. 

Outside of the panels, roundtables, discussions, and debates, there will also be music and art. 

“All American Rejects are playing a field recording, which is a collaboration that we’ve got with NPR music and the team behind Tiny Desk,” said Veysey. “We’ve got the Michelin Star Chef, Eric Ripert from Le Bernadin, doing a culinary conversation. You’ve got all these different immersive kinds of experiences that truly make the festival festive. The exciting part of that is it allows attendees to be in a different mindset.”

While tickets are mostly sold out for the main events, residents and visitors this week can still get tickets to select “Evenings at Ideas” events.

“On the 27th, the 28th and the 29th Australian artist C.J. Hendry is doing an artistic intervention called Bloom, which is a tribute to Elizabeth Paepke,” said Veysey. “We are planting 15,000 inflatable custom wild flowers that attendees can pick and bring home with them. And one is the state flower, the Columbine, one is the Black Eyed Susan, and then the third is the Indian paintbrush. Attendees can pick and bring home a bouquet of flowers.”