For the past three years, The Aspen Institute has held a week-long gathering over the Fourth of July holiday in bucolic Aspen. The festival convenes hundreds of politicians, artists, academics and other, well, big thinkers who exchange ideas in the spirit of "serious, uninhibited, and intellectually uncompromising public discourse."

This summer, Big Think's production team was fortunate enough to have been invited to film at the festival. While there is no substitute to actually attending, we hope this feature offers some sense of the extraordinary intellectual experience that is the Aspen Ideas Festival.

To learn more about the upcoming 2008 Aspen Ideas Festival, click here.

Andrew Carmellini, former chef at Manhattan's A Voce, on the benefits of a culinary education.