Every year since 2005, for a week in late June, 250 presenters and 3,000 attendees gather on the Aspen Institute's campus in Colorado, to “engage in deep and inquisitive discussions of the ideas and issues that both shape our lives and challenge our times.” In Abe Koogler’s new play, Aspen Ideas, the characters journey to the festival with their fellow “thinkers, writers, artists, business people, teachers, and other leaders drawn from myriad fields and from across the country and around the world—gathered in a single place, ready to teach, speak, lead, question and answer.” Below is a schedule from real-life events and discussions that occurred during the Aspen Ideas Festival in 2019, curated to the liking and interests of Koogler’s characters.
In an early morning conversation, Elizabeth Dunn, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia, tackles the age-old question: Why can’t money buy happiness? Among her suggestions for living a happier life as a millionaire: “Pay someone to do the tasks you hate doing. In a study of 800 millionaires in the Netherlands, half said they weren’t paying for help with things they didn’t like doing. It suggests there’s this unrealized opportunity for people to buy their way out of the stuff that brings them down.”
Yale professor Laurie Santos describes her morning session: “On paper, many have lives that appear awesome, but they're just not feeling it.” She recommends some “mental hacks” to overcome these barriers.
McKinsey & Company—perhaps the biggest and most powerful consulting firm in the world with over $10 billion in yearly revenue—leads a panel discussion on “how business leaders can develop risk management frameworks across their portfolios, the role of financial intermediation (including banking, insurance, and investment), and how leaders can take action now to address short- and long-term effects of climate change.”
LUNCH BREAK
Pro-basketball players Kevin Love and DeMar DeRosen; Edward W. Stack, the C.E.O of Dick’s Sporting Goods; ESPN Sports anchor Cari Champion; and Tom Farrey, the leader of the Aspen Institute Sport program in conversation on how sports can help communities solve “academic achievement, drug use, female empowerment, race relations, obesity, mental health, [and] medical costs.”
Looking ahead to the inevitable, Rhiana Gunn-Wright (policy director, New Consensus), Etosha Cave (co-founded, Opus 12), Varun Sivaram (Chief Technology Officer, ReNew Power India), and Greg Gershuny (Executive Director, Energy and Environment Program, Aspen Institute) discuss a future where greenhouse gas emissions have been ended, once and for all.
EGOT winner Common, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein, and the President of the American Enterprise Institution Arthur Brooks sit down to chat. The conversation will be accompanied by a performance by Pop-Up Magazine, which will, in real time, tell “vivid, multimedia, nonfiction stories” accompanied by an original musical score.
American university professor Ibram X. Kendi asks the attendees of the Aspen Ideas Festival to “explore what an antiracist society might look like, how we can play an active role in building it, and what being an antiracist in your own context might mean.”
DINNER BREAK
Listen to self-described musician, actor, and activist Common “present messages of love, forgiveness, healing, and celebration, in his own unique style” through live performance.
In your final event of the night, listen to a round table of panelists agree that the problems of American politics would all be solved if people just talked to each other. “Isn’t the great problem of our politics precisely that so much of it can’t be conducted face to face?”
-Fiona Selmi