Acid, Fear, and the American Mind

San Francisco has always functioned as America’s unofficial laboratory for consciousness: Beat mysticism, CIA experimentation, hippie utopianism, tech-world optimization culture, pharmaceutical psychiatry, psychedelic therapy. My Twin the Murderer enters that lineage sideways—not as nonfiction, or nostalgia piece, but as a psychological thriller in which fractured identity and M**der become portals into deeper questions about who controls perception itself. In conversation with former MAPS education director Renee Franzwa, author of the forthcoming How to Talk to Your Parents About Drugs, novelist Lindsay Kent traces the uneasy continuum connecting MKUltra, Ken Kesey-era counterculture, and today’s psychedelic renaissance. The result is neither celebration nor condemnation, but a live inquiry into the unstable border between liberation and manipulation.

At a moment when Silicon Valley promises cognitive enhancement, therapy language saturates daily life, and psychedelics are rapidly moving from outlaw sacrament to institutional medicine, the stakes of consciousness have become newly political. What happens when the tools once associated with rebellion become mechanisms of optimization? Who gets to define “healing,” “sanity,” or even reality itself? Blending literary suspense, Bay Area cultural history, and sharp contemporary debate, this event offers something increasingly rare: a conversation willing to treat the human mind not as a branding opportunity or self-help project, but as contested territory.

Lindsay Kent, aka The Hallucinarrator, is an award-winning filmmaker turned fiction writer whose work explores the luminous edges of consciousness and psychedelics. Her films include the 2014 documentary Going Furthur, retracing the arc of MKUltra and America’s counterculture; the Gaia docuseries Plant Medicine, set at an Ayahuasca retreat center in Costa Rica; and the acclaimed comedy short The Split, about life with (and without) an ego. Now returned to her first love—fiction—Kent blends a filmmaker’s eye with a psychonaut’s curiosity, blurring the boundaries between science and spirit, cinema and literature. Her debut psychedelic thriller, My Twin the Murderer, the first installment in a new novel series, is out June 20, 2026.

Renée Franzwa has worked at the intersection of learning, healing, and economic opportunity for two decades across Stanford, General Assembly, Unity, MAPS, and the psychedelic field. She has supported some of the most privileged and some of the most vulnerable populations along with the organizations building for them to find their path to prosperity. As President of Keep Rising, she leads a platform that makes deeply personalized advising scalable; as co-founder of Mind Shift Collective, she's architecting a community of practice for builders of the psychedelic ecosystem. She's the author of the forthcoming How to Talk to Your Parents About Drugs.