If there’s anything Original Thinkers encourages, it’s that we all are original thinkers. The concept is at once approachable as it is lofty, but it is one that OT founder and ringleader, David Holbrooke, and president Meredith Lavitt, are confident the festival, and humanity, are poised to tackle. The annual gathering, scheduled for Sept. 29 through Oct. 2 at the historic Sheridan Opera House, has announced the early round of its provocative programming and that tickets are now available for purchase.

TELLURIDE — Gwen Thompkins, a radio host and reporter from New Orleans, is playing clips from the Golden Record that NASA tucked into its 1977 Voyager spacecraft before it plumbed the most remote corners of the universe, a soundscape collected from around the planet including Chuck Berry and Louis Armstrong…

SAN MIGUEL COUNTY — In this place, where miners in the past harvested limestone from the mountains near Telluride, Gabriel Lifton-Zoline hopes to extract creativity and ideas.

The decommissioned Deep Creek Mine is ground zero for an art, music and light show installation as well as the grand finale for the second annual Telluride Original Thinkers Festival.

The canyon walls that box end-of-the-road Telluride inspire some out-of-the-box thinking.

Big-thinkers in the shadows of those crags strung the first alternating-current long-distance transmission lines anywhere; they battled corporations and raised $50 million to buy and preserve the valley floor; they linked communities with the country’s first free gondola and they seeded first-of-their-kind festivals…

A new festival that aims to transform the way we think and look at the intersection between story and ideas is coming to Telluride this month…

The foremost goal of most festivals is to entertain…

What Jedidiah Jenkins learned by bicycling across the world

A year-long, 14,000-mile journey through the Americas gave Jedidiah Jenkins new insight on our connectedness...

Ball of confusion, that’s what the world is today. So sang The Temptations in their 1970 hit that enumerated the world’s woes. Little has changed, it would seem, and there are many who believe the state of the world has deteriorated…

Ringleader David Holbrooke and co-conspirator Gabe Lifton-Zoline discuss the upcoming debut of the Original Thinkers Festival

The Up Next Podcast interviews David Holbrooke about what it really takes to start and organize a successful film festival unlike any other…

Telluride TV interviews David Holbrooke about how to create deeper engagement and free cognitive bandwidth from "the fracturing of the collective"…

Telluride Daily Planet interviews David Holbrooke about moving on from Mountainfilm, why October, and what differentiates Original Thinkers from any other festival…

Off The Record interviews David Holbrooke about starting anew, his love for the Mountainfilm Nation, and how he plans on bringing people together…