The Future Is Actually Starting to Happen | Andrew Côté, Deep Tech Week

I had been thinking Austin needed some kind of frontier-tech week when Andrew Côté announced that he was bringing Deep Tech Week here. I reached out almost immediately, and now I’m helping build it. That gave us the excuse for this conversation, but the rabbit hole went much deeper. We are living through a moment when things that recently belonged mostly to science fiction are becoming companies and products you can actually encounter in the physical world.  That is where Andrew’s perspective gets especially useful. He has moved from engineering physics and fusion into shaping what is essentially a storytelling platform around the people trying to make these futures real. Austin is becoming one of the places where that transition is unusually tactile, where the imagined future is starting to become something you can walk into, touch, and build. Agenda 0:00 Austin’s takeoff and cowboy futurism 10:00 Where physics meets economics 17:12 Industry, AI and abundant energy 28:18 The geography of deep tech 33:29 Underwriting hard tech 39:21 Ambition and the sci-fi future 46:47 Austin’s factories and permission 53:53 Orbit, beamlines and what comes next Come to Austin Deep Tech Week The week opens with a hardware showcase at The American Housing Corp on September 21. The Factory Crawl runs September 22–24, with stops including ICON, Neurophos and Emerald Cloud Lab. We close with a nuclear-powered party at the Aalo Atomics factory on September 25. Explore the full schedule and register Guest Bio & Links Andrew Côté: X, Writing, Deep Tech Week Andrew Côté is an engineering physicist that went from designing superconducting magnets for nuclear fusion to running deep tech week.  ------------------- Austin Next Links: Website, X/Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn Ecosystem Metacognition Substack