SXSWTF
The following is for satirical and entertainment purposes only
It’s that time of year again - the post SXSW integration period after the massive, immensely influential culture and tech conference that descends upon downtown Austin every March.
There’s apparently something strangely addictive about waiting in lines for overhyped and underwhelming brand activations and immersive experiences, dodging scooter gangs of unruly teenagers all hopped up on Delta-9 cannabis, and futilely attempting to beat a hangover with brisket breakfast tacos. Should’ve drank more Brez cannabis and Lion’s Mane infused social tonic, but the Texan blood runs deep in me and occasionally causes me to seek out something more sinister. Remember the Alamo (Drafthouse)!
In fact I was Texas Sober the majority of the weekend: Only drinking high noon seltzers and doing blue lotus gummies and Amanita muscaria capsules from Minnesota Nice Ethnobotanicals.
I flew into Austin for my third consecutive SXSW to attend the psychedelics track conference programming. I even spoke on a panel, or so I’ve been told.
In my 36-hour in and out whirlwind of a trip to Austin, I managed to schedule 48 hours worth of activities and social engagements. It’s a common fallacy that time is linear, especially when dealing in the realm of psychedelics. It’s far more elastic than people give it credit for, same as the human psyche. I hit the ground running on Saturday morning by splitting time between two of the kick-off panels for the SXSW psychedelics track - I was inspired by the calm, collected insights of clinical pharmacologist and entrepreneur Stehanie Karzon Abrams of Beyond Consulting during the “Expanding Horizons: Women’s Health & Psychedelics” panel at 10 am, where Stephanie proclaimed the importance of expanding clinical research for and by women.
“Expanding Horizons: Women’s Health & Psychedelics” panel
“Women have typically been excluded from a lot of clinical research and we haven’t really studied the biochemistry of females - so here’s an opportunity bigger than ever because we are noticing that there are important intersections between psychedelic medicines and estrogen.” - Stephanie Karzon Abrams
This panel also taught me that men indeed produce estrogen, which makes me feel like it’s totally socially acceptable for me to wear a thong.
I dipped early from the first panel to catch the second half of “Exploring The Future of Psychedelic Travel” with Communications Consultant Eva McGarry and journalist Michaela Trimble. A spirited analysis of the present and future of the increasingly popular psychedelic tourism sector evoked many open-ended inquiries and reflections from the pair, and made me feel like I should open a travel agency for psychonauts.
“So last summer you did the Bufo cruise in the Bahamas, how about a Mad Honey sojourn in Nepal this quarter?
It’s brilliant - when inner travel becomes too blasé, you can simply sell holiday packages that take people to the Himalayas physically to conquer their own mental Mount Everest internally. It’s so fucking meta. But seriously though, if you’re a British expat running a high ticket mushroom retreat in Jamaica, consider cutting the local Jamaican community into the project on a partnership and cooperative basis rather than as exclusively cooks as maids.
Josie Kins and Dillan DiNardo of Mindstate Design Labs
I rubbed elbows with a who’s who of hucksters and opportunists in the space at the Psychedelics Meet Up at 11 am on Saturday. The key to successfully networking at these events is to name drop as often as possible.
Allow me to demonstrate -
“I’m working to create a more equitable psychedelic medicine access model to get these medicines to everyone who needs them. Which is everyone on the planet on a daily basis according to my pitch deck. I play tennis with Stan Grof’s niece. Would you like to invest?”
Simple, elegant, demure.
By 2:30 PM, it was time to kick off my panel “Psychedelics in the Media” alongside Cesar Marin of Cultivating Wisdom, Carly Dutch-Greene of Studiodelic, and Alexandra Plesner of Psychedelics Design. I misunderstood the assignment, and immediately launched into a story about the time I took LSD with Tucker Carlson at a Dead and Company show. By the time the acid wore off, I realized it wasn’t Tucker at all but rather a young Laotian man who vaguely resembled Tucker and had an identical haircut.
Kicking off the ‘Psychedelics in the Media’ panel
I find that audience participation works as an icebreaker of sorts in public speaking situations. To really sell the intro for our talk, I picked a random person in the crowd and asked
“Didn’t we smoke DMT together behind the Walmart in Tallahassee last year? No? You’ve got a machine elf doppelganger.”
Works every time, and it’s always half true.
The panel went off flawlessly, except for the flaws I brought to the table - my co-presenters effortlessly held their cool and provided insightful and detailed analysis on the way legacy and new media platforms shape public opinion about psychedelics while I mostly told stories about doing drugs in interesting places and somehow ending up being quoted in Forbes for it.
The last panel of the day I caught was “AI Models Driving The Next Generation of Psychedelics” with Dillan DiNardo and Josie Kins of Mindstate Design Labs.
While initially disappointed that they were talking about models in the sense of computational outputs and not my future AI girlfriend, I warmed up to the topic after bearing witness to the mind-blowing simulated DMT trip visuals that Josie had programmed for the audience. Bespoke states of consciousness precision targeted for individuals is apparently where the future is headed - whether or not the Hat Man will find his way into these states of consciousness is still up for debate.
I can see it now: I’ve paid good money to escape my rat race life making widgets for automatons and absconded to a custom Bahamas cruise simulation induced by a next generation iteration of obscure Alexander Shulgin synthesized compound only to find the mysterious shadowy archetype of unknown origins infiltrating my delusions of grandeur by peering into my ocean view suite from an adjacent balcony. I still get high the old fashioned way: 10 milligram cannabis edibles and film noir.
One of the fullest rooms of the Psychedelics Track
It’s interesting to note that the buzz and size of the psychedelics track has indeed significantly dwindled over the last few years, mirroring the descending hype on a multinational corporate scale that has seen a reduction in funding events from the billion dollar company valuations of 2021 and virtually guaranteed FDA approval of MDMA in 2024 to half-full rooms and zero significant press coverage of the SXSW psychedelics track in 2025.
Because billion dollar valuations and FDA approval was never what psychedelics were about. The real action is happening outside of the hype bubble. Psychedelics have never been more popular than they are today, and they’ve also never been more out of the hands of the government and corporatocracy.
While pharmaceutical FDA-approved MDMA campaigners harped on for the umpteenth straight year about the future promise of hierarchically sanctioned psychedelics and lamented the setback that last summer’s FDA rejection of the Lykos Therapeutics New Drug Application for MDMA brought, pharmaceutical-grade MDMA was actively circulating Austin and mushrooms were damn near as popular as alcohol at the afterparty circuit. Amanita muscaria mushrooms, for legal clarification.
The ACT 3 Party on Saturday night - the place to be
The place to be on Saturday night was the ACT 3 party at BATHE, Austin’s elevated community bathhouse. The saunas and jacuzzis were off, but I wore my speedo anyways. I’d feel naked without it. The party was a fundraiser for the Center for Shamanic Education and Exchange, an organization that nobly supports indigenous communities around the world. It was a “Founders founder” kind of evening;The only social proof we need for your brand is to know whether or not the executive team does Hape with the other founders in the VIP area.
As a veteran of the psychedelic conference insider circuit, I have actionable intel on how to infiltrate the exclusive demographic of full-time conference people. If you kiss enough ass and wear enough fur at burning man-esque functions, you may get to become one of the conference people too. Just make sure to keep your opinions to yourself unless they’re officially sanctioned positions among the upper echelons of the hierarchy, and laugh whenever a high status male in the group says something funny - even if it’s not funny, which it’s usually not - however it’s important to read the room and body language of the other people being preached at to make sure that laughing is the correct response to the anecdote or aphorism de jeur. The body language can sometimes be tough to read in the context of a cuddle puddle, because it’s just a bunch of people massaging coconut oil into each other - if that’s the case, just keep quiet and make purring noises until someone tells you it’s ok to speak.
Everyone in the psychedelic crowd is basically a politician at this point. Hob-nobbing at exclusive events with a $100 suggested conscious donation that everybody somehow got into for free, one upping each other with stories of our most valiant ego death experiences and bitching about our Ubers being 5 minutes late.
Why don’t we ever see a panel with people from the FDA on them at these psychedelic track events? If they’re the arbiters of legitimacy for millennia old molecules to be publicly accepted, why must they silo themselves off in beige government buildings and circle jerk over regulatory affairs instead of just eating mushrooms in cool places with good people like the rest of us?
No conference track would be complete without a constellation of dubiously employed MAPS team members who masterfully obfuscate the actual function and results of their role within the organization. MAPS has discovered the most ingenious method of funding their never-ending series of hedonistic soirees since PT Barnum discovered artifice. If they were half as good at conducting research and public relations as they are at throwing parties that appeal to a very specific demographic of playboy “philanthropists” and burners, every single one of shulgin’s 500 novel molecules in the family IP archives would be FDA-approved by now. I can personally get behind 5-MeO-DIPT for adjusting the tone of RFK Jr.s’ voice. I feel like I’m having an aneurysm every time he opens his mouth - not just because of the batshit insane shit he says, but because of the stultifying pitch with which he conveys his messaging.
$20 for two tacos that I had to download an app to order in person with is dystopian but the brisket was incredible
The ghost of Roky Erickson haunts the SOHO house clientele riddled new Austin, and Daniel Johnston has far more in common with the destitute unhoused population crowding the alleyways off Brazos street than the model influencer dj’s that constitute Austin’s new weird in today’s world. At one point I had to download a fucking app just to buy a taco when the guy who made it was standing three feet away from me. I imagine this act of the new normal elevated an ESG score somewhere. The tacos were $6, but somehow came out to $10 each thanks to the mandatory 20% tip that was slapped onto my order that I had to go way out of my way to dial in myself, and one or two other unexplained taxes on the receipt. Taxation, so hot in Texas right now. $20 for two tacos is the modern version of a wild west stage coach robbery, except it’s politicians wearing alligator boots that quietly and anonymously slip into your financial transaction and loot the coffers before you can say ‘Alamo’.
SXSW is a cultural juggernaut, and psychedelics perhaps *the* quintessential cultural juggernaut, so when you throw them together you get a real boondoggle. There’s something uniquely SXSW-y about being shouted at by a deranged and disheveled aggressor person in American flag booty shorts while high on Kanna and navigating between the open bar comped by a Norwegian SaaS company and a talk about Building an Equitable Psychedelic Future TM.
SXSW is truly a spectacle to behold, and it’s best experienced while microdosing - not legal or financial advice. Whatever the state of the world, at least mushrooms still baffle me with the scope of their mystery and beguiling wisdom that somehow applies to everyday life in late stage capitalism 21st Century. Try achieving that level of effortless value and utility with a patented proxy. When the world looks like it’s going to shit - just remember that such is the perfect condition for mushrooms to thrive.
