Hugh Forrest, former President and longtime programming lead for Austin’s famed South by Southwest Festival, joins the Plutopia podcast to discuss shifting from running massive events to consulting on smaller community-focused experiences.
Hugh argues that size is the enemy of community — people attend events to form a few meaningful connections — and says organizers should design “experiences,” not just events. These experiences should prioritize community formation, face-to-face interaction, safety, and year-round engagement.
Reflecting on lessons learned, he notes how growth fractures communities, how conflicts can be weathered with transparency, and how logistics decisions (like moving hallway chats into rooms) can unintentionally dilute the magic.
The conversation widens to the internet’s lost sense of fun, the limits and risks of AI (including energy costs), and the enduring need for professionally curated local journalism and civic forums. Forrest highlights his work with Andus Labs to keep humans central in tech adoption and concludes that fostering smaller, civil, in-person gatherings remains vital to rebuilding trust and connection.
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Hugh Forrest:
Size is very much the enemy of community. This was something we talked about some at South by Southwest, and everybody made the decision, well, no, we shouldn’t restrict size. And part of the decision-making process was because we had so many problems getting any kind of size to the thing. But again, size and scale is the enemy of productive conversations. No one goes to a conference or an event to meet 15,000 other people, 20,000 other people, 30,000 other people. You go there to meet, to make strong connections with, a much smaller portion of people. There are an infinite amount of mulligans I would take advantage of if you could do that in life, but certainly one of the ones would be in rethinking the growth of South by Southwest.
