How This Texan Startup Ranch Plans To Save America

You can just do things in Texas, which is why I find myself here. This is Prototown, and it's meant to be the birthplace of a revolution. Logistically speaking, Prototown is some ranch land located about halfway between Austin and San Antonio. Rhetorically speaking, This is the site of a new-age hardware utopia. Prototown. The Prototown founders are summoning people here to make things. They offer plentiful, cheap land and fewer rules. They have spots for startups and factories. They hope, rather grandiosely, to create a new Detroit or Los Alamos, or, let's go ahead and say it, a new Shenzhen. The man who started all this is named Josh.

What's up, guys? Hey, how you doing?

And this is his hair. Can this hair save America? I wanted to find out.

I wanna go where Jesus be.

We are in Lockhart, Texas, halfway between Austin and San Antonio. We're heading to Prototown. It's supposed to be this hardware startup town. It's been very secretive. We're getting the first ever look for an outsider. To be honest, I don't know who's backing this. I don't know what we're getting into. This could be amazing, it could be underwhelming. I don't know. I always like these kind of stories where you don't really know what you're getting into fully.

Here we go.

I descended upon Proto Town last fall. People David had described it to me as a secret hardware cult. Which way to Prototown? The good news is that I specialize in hardware cults and knew just how to approach the mission at hand. With subtlety and the utmost tact. There it is, Prototown.

Oh, I gotta pee so bad.

This is what we do at all the sites, we immediately mark the territory. After establishing our presence, We found a young but active 1,200-acre compound. There were people living in Connex trailers. There were startups working away on projects, and there were foundations being laid for factories. All of this was drenched in America can do big shit propaganda.

There you go. There's your brisket. There's a healthy serving.

To try and begin to understand this place, I engaged in an ancient Texan ritual known as eating barbecue with the three Prototown founders, Josh and Merle, and then John, the only real Texan among the bunch.

Too bad the camera guys aren't going to eat. We got plenty here. Maybe we should hold off on the candles. Might give off a little bit of a cult vibe.

Well, you two, you guys aren't from Texas, are you? Oh no, no.

That's our great sin.

Now you're just like living out on a ranch.

Mm-hmm.

And you guys seem happy with this.

Oh yeah. We were just talking about how much gratitude we have to just be out, like the kind of experience we're having out here and what we're learning. I think it's cool though, like early days of the, you know, we call them pioneers who live out here, basically have to convince their families that it's a good idea for them to move to this ranch that no one's ever heard of where these people say they're building like a hardware cluster. Once they get out here at Prototown, they realize that, man, you can get stuff done and it's open spaces and people aren't in your business and We want to help them and do that networking and watch them grow. It sounds pretty ridiculous on paper.

It's hard to build a city.

Yeah, so when people come down here, they have to have some kind of innate curiosity. And so that fosters a very cool community. It's just really important that we have a founding culture at Prototown, a culture that if you don't foster it at the very beginning, I think is very hard to astroturf. Come on, come on. Don't worry. Don't fret. What are you waiting for? Come down to Prototown. We got housing. We got land. We got startup capital. Work on something absolutely crazy.

As far as aspirational hardware prophets go, Josh seems pretty chill and well-meaning. Josh went to Duke and while there spent time building hardware. After college, Josh decided people like him needed a place to try out their big ideas. He came up with the Prototown concept and recruited his fellow Dukie and best friend Merle to join the quest.

I was trying to pitch the concept to people in their boardrooms and stuff, and it was pretty bleak, I'd say, in terms of— it was—

was buzz.

Yeah, it was just hard for people to fully understand. And so I thought maybe I could control the environment fully. So I got this converted into a '50s TWA kind of style bus and then went on this 60,000-mile journey around the US.

Josh went on a roadshow selling his vision for a new manufacturing town to anyone who would listen. Like the Merry Pranksters, if the Merry Pranksters were into reindustrialization.

Oh, Big Red Bus.

This is nice, man. You were driving this around and you'd bring like investors in here and just—

Yeah, so now when we go places, people are like, oh, Big Red Bus guys. Yeah. You know, oh, update. So this is the model of the rocket I built in college.

No way, man. Oh, you weren't messing around. So you built a two-stage rocket in how long?

It took a year, but we did it all over the internet with just— it was built remotely, like across the country, basically. We're trying to get to the Kármán line. Didn't end up making it, but it ended up going like Mach 6.

The journal did a story on your rocket?

Oh yeah, it ran as the A-head, and I got one of those dot sketches, and it was funny because They just found this like bro-y snapback hat pic of me and I was like, "Oh man, I have way better pics than that." That like stays with you forever.

There are no shortcuts to that home on high. My real exploration of Prototown began in earnest the next day. The QB, behold! I made my way over to an inflatable factory. That has served as the first center of gravity for startups here. People work day and night on a handful of different projects, and many of them live on the grounds. The first pioneer I encountered was Evan, and he wants to build solar-powered air conditioning.

They look like solar panels. This is one of our prototypes.

Okay.

They basically take heat from the sun, and they have very thin layers of chemical reactions, so like endothermic, you know, cooling reactions. They basically charge like a battery and then they release it as cooling.

Okay, so it's just taking the heat from the sun, right? And then there's some kind of like chemical spread throughout this panel. The cold air just like comes out of the panels. Yeah, I mean, these are meant for buildings, they're meant for houses.

So large infrastructure, warehouses, warehouses through data centers, through the military. And so we'll be doing like this building, some of the other buildings that they're planning in Prototown.

And how long have you been in Prototown?

I moved here April 1st. Kind of as an April Fools' joke to my parents.

Okay. Dude, do you like working in the Qubi? It's hot, man.

It's a good problem for us.

Yeah, that's right. Your fellow Quberians will be so happy. Exactly.

Yeah.

In theory, this saves massively on energy and the panels can do their thing for 20 years with no maintenance.

So you can see here, all of these rows will be filled out with the panels that we're cooling. Okay. So we're doing about 10 per day and these will be used to air condition this entire building.

And you think this would cool the whole thing?

Yeah.

How is it like actively pushing the air through? I mean, I guess you still need like a motor and everything, right?

In traditional air conditioning, about 90 to 95% is just the compressor.

Yeah.

And only 5, 10% is the fans. So we're, you know, removing—

getting rid of that—

almost all of the energy. And then we can have very small solar panels to move the fans or motors around.

So you think you might make them on site?

Yeah, we will. So in the next 6 months, we're designing our manufacturing plant, so we'll be making not 10 per day, but thousands per day.

Holy cow, like right in—

Yeah.

—part of town. Amazing, man. You're going to be the chief cooler of— Exactly. —Brookville. Right across the room from Evan is this fella, Zach, from Eden Technologies. They're developing a massive centrifuge to improve desalinization and water purification systems. Many of the reverse osmosis water treatment plants today suffer from constantly clogged filters. Eden wants to use the turbulent powers of a centrifuge to keep the filters clean and to up the clean water recovery rates of desal systems.

In the past 5 or 6 years, I've been working on how we would basically design large commercial versions of this centrifuge idea to use in any kind of, uh, saline water treatment, whether it be seawater, brackish groundwater, or any kind of manufacturing waste stream. Stream ranging from oil and gas water, even to laundry wash water.

It's basically more clean water for less energy and less money. One of the advantages of Prototown is that you can test your hardware right on site and even tap into a nearby stream. You can also curl up next to your centrifuge at night to make sure it doesn't spin out of control. So you're just sleeping while it's spinning? Yeah.

If you hear some Weird rollover and turn the dial down, you know?

Do you think you'll be here for a while or you guys get like a permanent home? I think it'll be here for a while.

It's got character.

Yeah. Do you feel like you're in like a hardware commune or just the place to work? What is it?

I've been calling it a capitalist commune. Okay. I think that's the best way to describe it.

Eden and Atmos are among several startups that have based their companies right in Prototown. Some larger companies like Bedrock Robotics are taking advantage of the space for testing operations. They do something which a number of startups are trying to do now, which is autonomous construction equipment. They've got this sensor system that you can retrofit excavators, other machinery, and even though there's an operator in there, he's not really doing anything. He's just kind of minding the stuff. Door while this robot excavates. At lunchtime, the pioneers gather in the main house. All of this was once meant to be torn down to make room for a new subdivision. But when that project collapsed, Prototown swooped in and took over the land. All you guys like hang out at night or everyone does their own thing?

Tree climbing. Yeah. Zach's the tree climbing champion. I can scale an oak like you couldn't believe. I'll peek in sometimes, hold a man with a smoker, smoke some breast-kitted chick. You definitely feel like a family relationship with everyone. Yeah. You know, we're all struggling, building stuff, helping each other. It's a very cool environment. We'll be eating dinner, we'll just have conversations about fundraising to design stuff, and just have people like that around you is a big plus. I feel like I force gunk my way into really cool situations. Even in Austin, I felt still kind of isolated because the hard tech folks don't really— there's not a community.

Yeah.

So having a place and running alongside people in the same boat, heading the same direction. Yeah. Really, really great. I think we're trying to keep our process really informal. There was no application or anything. I think that really works to our strength because it just selects for the right— selects for the right people. We want this to always feel like a frontier campus-like place. As much as we want to see speed and like hardware development, I think the strength of Proto Town is the fact that you're so connected to like the landscape here. So this is a sweet— this is one of the cooler like oak groves on the property. Oh yeah, this is a nice thing to do. It's like the outskirts of the city where like your weird uncle who's like really excited about drone testing lives in this campus. This is our swimming hole that Bedrock's actually helped us build just kind of on their off time. We are excited about that. It's going to take some rain to fill it and then I hope that our well cranks. Well, I—

Joyce, no Texas was going to be the spot where you wanted to end up. When you started thinking about this, it could have been anywhere.

There's that kind of meme in Texas that's like, if you're not born here, then you try and get here as soon as you can. But I think there's a love for hardware here. Like everyone just is so mechanically inclined and works on their equipment all the time. And so there's a real intuitive understanding for hardware and like all these like capability sets that we need here. We moved out here and it was just a cattle ranch and then we put the Oppenheimer billboard up and then everyone came out here and was like, "This is the most inspiring place I've ever been to." And we were just like, "It's just like one billboard." I think Los Alamos also clicks for people, like trying to describe this place. Yeah. And people kind of go, "Okay, town meant for science frontier, we get it." Is it absolute madness to try and build a hardware utopia from scratch?

Well, yes and no. Shenzhen had been a fishing village for centuries until China decided to turn it into a manufacturing city in the 1980s. In the span of just 45 years, it has morphed into a metropolis of 20 million people and become the manufacturing hub of the entire world. To do something similar here, you would need labor and access to capital, and Prototown has some of that. The spot is flanked by Austin and San Antonio, and Central Texas is booming. Elon Musk is building one massive factory after another in nearby Bastrop. There were times that Prototown reminded me of a young Mojave, California. California. Mojave is just a couple hours from Los Angeles and has long been the place where airplane and space enthusiasts could go to test their wildest ideas. Maybe this could be the Texan equivalent of a grand hardware experimentation zone. Josh and Merle, though, are clearly dreaming even bigger. They're dreaming of factories and jobs and nothing less than a revitalized America.

Building something like this in America just feels like really important as a story and that a lot of people can appreciate that we can do these kinds of things again and do it actually like at scale. But I think right now the main focus is like, can we just do it and do it really well and keep the quality really high and making sure that the founders that are here and the companies are here having like the best possible experience they could have.

And part of it, I mean, it's called Prototown, like a prototype. So this is, this is in some ways like a early test, you guys sort of, it seems like, see this as like step one to some possibly larger vision or—

The name is a little bit, you know, it's because people are prototyping here. It's because, you know, for us as well, it's like, let's prototype this concept. So there's a lot of meanings there, but it's not like leading with the real estate side of things. It wasn't like set out and like build a town. Yeah. And hardware is a part of that. It's build an awesome hardware ecosystem, and you get something that looks like a town around that.

The adult supervision for this whole operation is John. He's been a politician in Texas and rather randomly ended up as Prototown's closest neighbor. He has a hell of a compound of his own. Somewhere along the way, John bought into what Josh and Merle were doing and decided to join forces. Talk to all these people around the US who want to bring manufacturing back to the States, all this stuff. I mean, why do you think it can't be that Elon's like the only guy who's figured this out?

It's like anything. I, I believe it's just we kind of like lost a generation, you know. I mean, it just— because we weren't manufacturing here, China, you know. And you also lost the craftsmen too. It's the same thing, right? You lost people that knew how to, to do woodworking. You lost people that knew how to weld. And I think once they're taught that or shown that you can do that, I think that inspires people to go, "Ah, that's what I want to do." You think we could get it back? I do. I think people want to do it. I think there's a lot of people that were inspired. You know, that's what we're seeing at Proto Town. It's just a matter of giving some people the opportunity and showing that's possible.

Yeah. As we chatted, it became clear to me that the only way I'd really understand Proto Town would be to hang upside down in a plane. I asked John if this was a possibility, and he said yes. I pass out, you got it? Yeah, no, definitely.

All right, clear prop, clear.

All right, here we go.

Alright, we're gonna do a quick little wingo with you.

To which I said, Holy fuck!

That was a wingo!

Did you guys see that? I got the best job. Is there something culty about all this? Well, I'm glad you asked. Let's indulge in a fever dream to explore this idea. It is said that the best startups are cults, and the prime example here would be Texas itself. From 1836 to 1845, Texas was its own country. And that mythology of independence and ruggedness carries through to today. Texans love being in the cult of Texas. Of course, cults can go wrong. Some of you will remember David Koresh and the Branch Davidians and their compound near Waco. In 1993, the feds waged a 51-day standoff with Koresh and his followers. The saga ended horrifically for all parties. Weird people with nothing better to do, like me and this TikToker, still show up to perv on the compound. I'm sad because we can't go in because it's Sunday, but we knew that was probably going to happen. And it's still weird as fuck. Y'all taping me? You are. On the lighter side of Texan cults is Buc-ee's. We're gonna take our intern, Armand, to a Buc-ee's for the first time. You excited? I can't wait. It's like the Disneyland of gas stations. Wow. It's really hard, like the Buc-ee's.

Okay. It's a very appealing smell. This right here, this is a genius idea. Look at all these jerky. Wow.

There's jerky and clothes and objects. It's full of warmth, hypertension, and knickknacks that Americans are genetically predisposed to desire. It certainly does not need to exist, but God moves in mysterious ways and sometimes shines a divine light in unexpected places. The big decision for any cult then is, do you choose the path of polygamy and death, or do you choose the path of freshly sliced brisket? And that's all I have to say about that. It's pretty good.

That's right. And I'm curious too, for Prototown, all the things that you've seen, all the companies, and what do you think we should be mindful of? Like, what, what—

everything, everything takes a long time, longer than you think it's going to take, especially hardware, you know. I think you want some like, and it seems like you're heading this way, but some really big ambitious stuff, right?

You want to find a room temperature superconductor.

Right. You know, but that's what you're going to have to be willing to— it's going to be harder than you think.

I think you got to be willing to like— it is more suffering, more suffering. I mean, it is a long time resin project and we probably say that to one another all the time, but I think still don't internalize like how But that's what I was sort of saying.

You're the right age. It's good because you kind of don't want to internalize it.

Yeah, I don't know how much older we really could have been and like done this. Yeah. Or like taken this leap.

My time writing Bitch with the boys and dishing out impeccable wisdom gave me a new appreciation for Prototown. I feel like I understand a better than I did coming in. Um, you know, a lot of ways more legit than I would have thought. They've had this like culty reputation, but, um, and there's some like bits of that, you know, just all the pioneers and, and everybody living together. But I don't know, if it's culty, it's okay. It's just like got the right, right vibes and just interesting people trying to make stuff. It's okay. Everyone relax. In the months since I visited, Prototown has been booming. The well-funded nuclear startup Oklo is building a research reactor on site to produce isotopes. And a semiconductor startup has set up operations there as well. If I'm honest, they've made far more progress than I would have expected. I'm not sure the US really has the people or the will to build something like a Texan Shenzhen, but I for one would like to find out. Up next, I almost electrocute myself. Careful, that is live. See the tape?