a16z Podcast - Monitoring the Situation #3: Who Is Nick Land?

Episode Date: October 12, 2025

Zach Dell is founder and CEO of Base Power, an energy tech company that builds affordable, reliable power via home batteries.In this episode of Monitoring the Situation, a16z General Partners Erik Torenberg, Katherine Boyle, and Erin Price-Wright sit down with Zach to discuss the current state of home power generation, what’s misunderstood about the data center buildout, and how to fix the US electricity grid. Plus, Erik and Katherine talk with a16z crypto CTO Eddy Lazzarin about Silicon Valley’s favorite Dark Enlightenment philosopher, Nick Land. Resources:Follow Katherine on X: https://x.com/KTmBoyleFollow Eddy on X: https://x.com/eddylazzarinFollow Zach on X: https://x.com/ZachBDellLearn more about Base Power: https://www.basepowercompany.com/Learn more about Nick Land: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/who-is-nick-land Stay Updated: If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, subscribe, and share with your friends!Follow a16z on X: https://x.com/a16zSubscribe to a16z on Substack: https://a16z.substack.com/Follow a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zListen to the a16z Podcast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5bC65RDvs3oxnLyqqvkUYXListen to the a16z Podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a16z-podcast/id842818711Follow our host: https://x.com/eriktorenbergPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Stay Updated:Find a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Podcast on SpotifyListen to the a16z Podcast on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Nick Land's work is very vibe. It's really vibe. He has an intense, prosaic writing style that is provocative, intentionally grandiose. What's happening is new technology is being created, which is leading to a ton of demand for a thing, which is exposing the fact that we don't have a bunch of supply for that thing. And so now a bunch of supply is getting built to unlock new demand. And so new technology will get created, which will unlock new demand, which will expose more supply that hasn't been built.

And the fly wheel will go. That's where we get, you know, prosperity and economic growth and, you know, GDP. America is the finest. Exactly. Like, this is what it's all about, baby. This is why we're here, building companies in America. In 2025, the greatest cracking under its own weight. Data centers are multiplying, home batteries are surging,

and the line between energy and tech is starting to blur. On this third episode of monitoring the situation, I sit down with the A16Z general partners, Catherine Boyle, and Aaron Pricewright, along with Zach Dell, the founder and CEO of base power to talk about the future of energy. energy. We dig into how to make local power generation affordable, what most people get wrong about the data center buildout, and how we might actually fix the U.S. electricity grid.

Then, Catherine and I are joined by A16Z's Eddie Lazaran to discuss the philosopher shaping parts of Silicon Valley's intellectual underground. Nick Land. Let's get into it. Zach, welcome to monitoring the situation. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. So congrats on the series C. For people who are unfamiliar, one, you know, explain base the company mission and we'll get into the state of it today? Yeah, base is an energy technology company working to bring affordable and reliable power to America. So we started the business almost three years ago now, focused on Texas homeowners and selling batteries on their homes and using those batteries as a grid resource when the grid is up and running and then giving

that battery capacity back to the homeowner when the grid goes out to protect the home from power out it is. And we also sell power to the homeowner. So we're able to save people on the order of 10, 20% a month on their electricity bills. That was kind of how we got started using off-the-shelf hardware, all custom-built software. And over the course of the last two and a half years, we've really built out this vertically integrated strategy where we're now building our own batteries, designing them, manufacturing them, through our own installations, owning them, operating these batteries in wholesale markets. And now we're starting to enter other markets.

So we have a regulated utility partnership model where we take our technology, our hardware, our software, and we sell to these utilities and help them do the same thing. lower costs, increased reliability on the distribution grid. So really the mission here is bring down the cost of electricity for all. Make power more affordable, more reliable, do it through technology, vertical integration. Yeah, that's a quick high level. I feel like people talk a lot about generation with data centers and all new types of power and is it more gas plants or is it more solar or nuclear and pulling generation closer

to the actual usage. but maybe you talk to us about why energy storage is such an important part of the puzzle in keeping electricity prices down. Yeah, so again, it all comes back to price, right? Electricity is a commodity, and the best electron is the cheapest electron. And when you think about electricity prices, there are two components to price. One is the cost to generate the electron, and the other component is the cost to move the electron. And over the last 20 years, actually, the cost to generate electrons has gone down very significantly,

largely due to the build out of solar. Wind is well, but mostly solar, right? So cost to generate power has gone down, but the total cost of the electron has gone up, which means that the cost of move electrons, the cost of distribution and transmission has gone up really significantly. And this is because our infrastructure is aging and these poles and wires are breaking and they need to get replaced. And so there's a lot of CAPEX that has to go into building out this transmission distribution

infrastructure. And what we realized is poles and wires move power through space and batteries move power through time, right? So batteries and software are actually a way more efficient alternative. and there's a kind of academic term for this in NWA, non-wires alternatives, not the other NWA. And it's a very effective mechanism for driving down the cost of electricity because you can capture the decrease in the cost to generate the power by really also helping bring down the cost to move the power by having batteries on site.

So we deploy batteries where the load is, where interconnection is, and that makes for a much more efficient system. So can I pop up for a second because I want to get back to your origin story, which I feel like you were in a very unique position. Remind us again when you started the company, but you had been thinking about energy even a lot longer before base was founded. And I was wondering if part of it was that you were spending so much time in AI. You know, it's like chat GPT had the big moment in November 2022. You were an investor at Thrive? Like, how were you thinking about energy being such an important component of this AI revolution? And what made you say, okay, like, this is where we need to be

spending time, especially on the consumer side, just given how energy is about to energy needs are about to explode. Yeah, I mean, this was really a five plus year buildup for me. I started working on energy projects in college, actually. And I was kind of really in the weeds working to develop a way to do anaerobic digestion to turn human waste into biogas in rural parts of the world to create low-cost energy and also a sanitation solution. And that was a sticky, painful, messy problem, to say the very least.

But that was kind of my first foray into energy. And then actually at the end of college, I tried to put together this deal to go. go lease a bunch of lava rock in Hawaii and put solar panels on it and sell the power back to the government and went to a bunch of banks to try to get financing. They were like, what, you're in college, who's going to manage this? And I was like, okay, fair point. Maybe this doesn't make sense. Then I ended up going to Blackstone and I was on the private equity team there and look at a bunch

of stuff all across energy infrastructure there. And I think really when I was at Blackstone, that's where this paradigm shift hit me, where I saw, okay, the last five decades of energy have been defined by coal and the natural gas. And the next five decades are going to be defined by solar and storage. And really what that means is the marginal megawatt, the low-cost marginal megawatt, is going to be solar and storage. And that is going to change the way our energy infrastructure looks and works and the way the value chain is kind of built out. And this really stuck with me. And then I left Blackstone, obviously, enjoying Thrive Capital.

And I got to see really exemplars for companies that were innovating and taking market share from big incumbent dominated industries that were not engineering lead or technology driven R&D focused. obviously SpaceX and Aerospace and Anderil and defense being the kind of core examples. And this energy thesis kind of stuck with me. It was like, well, this paradigm shift is coming. Energy is really the last great part of the economy that's gone undisrupted. Why can't we go do to energy what those companies did to those respective industries? And then, of course, towards the end of my time, it thrived, we became large investors in Open AI.

And to your point, Aaron, started to see this massive tidal wave coming of this data center build out. And I think found ourselves in the. midst of a generational increase in electricity demand. And now that has just reached a total fever pitch. And we're seeing this insane buildout of data centers in Texas, you know, in North Virginia, obviously, we've been having for a long time and really across the whole country. And the constraint is electrons. It's not chips, right? Like the whole economy has been kind of constrained by electrons now, which is a new phenomenon. And so utilities are uniquely

open to new technologies, new solutions. And so that's been a really awesome opportunity for us to building too. Honestly, like, I feel like we're kind of like staring down the barrel or in the early innings of basically the largest industrial buildout that the U.S. has seen ever in all of history, like bigger than every industrial buildout that we've ever seen combined, which is great news for us as American Dynamism investors. Like, we don't have an industrial base. We don't have a military industrial base. We don't have all these other things. So I'm grateful to AI, honestly, for pushing us to figure out a lot of these thorny challenges that we're going to have to figure out if we want to be able to win a war with. China, et cetera, et cetera.

Yeah, these are very good problems to have, right? What's happening is new technology is being created, which is leading to a ton of demand for a thing, which is exposing the fact that we don't have a bunch of supply for that thing. And so now a bunch of supply is getting built to unlock new demand. And so new technology will get created, which will unlock new demand, which will expose more supply that hasn't been built. And the flywheel will go, and that's where we get prosperity and economic growth and GDP. America acts of the finest.

Exactly. This is what it's all about, baby. This is why we're here, building companies. in America. So it's the greatest time in history to be building a company in this great country. Totally. I will say the speed also matters so much because on monitoring the situation, we spent a lot of time on the internet. And one of the memes that's really popped up recently, both on the left and the right, is, okay, all of this AI is taking way too much energy. And it's actually driving consumer energy prices up. It's rising costs up. It's

something that is not sustainable. So I would love to hear your thoughts on how quickly you have to build, what needs to be done. I mean, in some ways, tech. Texas has figured out, and maybe you can talk a little bit about why Texas is such a unique place to build, but Texas has figured out how to deregulate and to make things much more affordable. Maybe talk about sort of what you could see that as a model for the country, not only building, but also sort of the regulatory regime. Yeah. So price economics 101, right? Price is a function of supply and demand. And when you have a ton of demand and low supply, you have prices going up. And that's largely what's happening in the energy space today. In Texas, you have, to your point, Catherine, a competitive free market. So market participants are exposed to price signals,

and there's a strong incentive to go build when prices go up, right? And that's why Texas leads the nation in solar and wind. Now, it also happens to sit in the middle of the sunbelt and the middle of wind corridor, which is really helpful, but it's got liquid price signals. And so there's a strong incentive for developers to ensure that market. That's why you're seeing a lot of these data, I mean, the second biggest data center market in the country behind Northern Virginia is Dallas-Fort Worth, right? And it's really easy to build there.

There's a lot of developers around. you can interact with the wholesale power markets and creative ways. And so I think, and if you kind of rewind the clock and look at the early 2000s, like why did so much of the kind of wind boom, solar boom happen in Texas before other places? Well, because it was the first state to deregulate.

Actually, not the first California deregulated first and then Iran put a quick stop to that. And so Texas kind of picked up the torch and ran with it. And so you had a bunch of the developers go to Texas and now Houston is really the energy capital of the country. And that's because of this free market dynamic. And so I think that over time,

time, the more that we can expose people, companies, organizations to price signals, the more innovation will have, the more technology will get deployed. And you'll see prices go down over time, right? Because demand goes up, supply stays the same. Prices go up. A bunch of supply comes in to arbitrage that away. And then prices go down. Demand goes up again, right? And that's what markets are for. So I'm optimistic that we will see prices come down as more supply gets built out. But this is kind of the natural cycles of markets. And I think it's largely healthy. We've seen a little bit of, you know, we're all excited about, but there's some backlash to the sort of data center surge or build out.

What's misunderstood about, or what do people not fully appreciate about what's going on here? Well, I think it's really easy in, you know, we've seen, I mean, I haven't seen all that many, because I'm not that old, but there's, you get these boom and bust cycles all the time, right? You know, whether it's, you know, crypto or, you know, LeBoo's or, you know, LaBou's, or whatever, you've got just like crazy hysteria that happens around big paradigm shifts and big demand cycles. And we're seeing this in AI, right?

It's like we all remember the first time we use chat GPT and our minds were blown. And, you know, these products, and then Claude came out and Grock came out and, you know, all these new things and, you know, cursor and cognition and all these new products that our team uses every day and all the companies you work with use every day.

And that has created this just insidious, issueable demand for compute. And the buildout and the investment, I mean, the speculation in this market is really unprecedented. I mean, you're seeing, you know, I've got friends that work at hedge funds who have, you know, landman equivalents of people who are driving around Texas just looking for land to buy to put data centers on. And they're just writing checks blindly from their offices in New York because they're like, hey, someone's going to take this off our hands. And, you know, everyone in their cousin is in the powered shell business now, right? And so you're seeing just incredible amount of speculation. And it's like, well, are we overbuilding or we underbuilding? And

the answer is like probably both, right? Like, we're going to overbuild and then we're going to underbuild and then we're going to underbuild. And there's going to be this just because it's such a big part of the market and there's so much demand, there's so much capital. You're going to have, you know, boom-bust kind of market economics play out. So I don't know that I have anything all that intelligent to say about, oh, there's this thing that no one's talking about that's, you know, under the scenes here. You know, one thing would be, you know, model efficiency, right? like we saw the deep seek breakthrough and I think there's other things kind of happening with being able to train these models and run inference in more efficient ways that need less compute

but you know it's anyone's anyone's guess to to determine like where the compute kind of battle is going to end and you've got these you know all these public companies that their stocks have gone totally crazy and who knows how it's going to play out I think that there will be a bit of a snapback and then I think I do think the kind of the steady march of demand will keep going. And over time, we will need a lot of this compute. But it's really hard to get the supply demand math correctly in the near term. And there will be some ugly outcomes as a result. Yeah. One thing that, you know, has been big in the news this week, at least for people who read the news in Chinese, is the basically the closing down of a lot of the, you know,

critical metals and minerals that are probably upstream of you in the supply chain from China would let like how like you know how should how does that affect this whole power build out like how are you guys thinking about that what should we what should we all be thinking about more as we look towards those upstream Chinese supply chain yeah I really have two minds here one it's maybe not what you respect me to say of it but is my real opinion which is like I believe a global economy is a better economy. It's a bigger economy. And I believe in, you know, free markets and labor specialization.

And I think that, yeah, a global economy where we can collaborate and coordinate with large global powers, whether it be China or otherwise, is good for the world. But we are in a time where there are a bunch of forces at play. and we have a particularly aggressive president with regards to tariffs. And if you are in the business of making things and some of the things that you need are largely made in China, you've got to take matters into your own hands.

And we've been very loud about this. Like, we accelerated our plans to build a factory in Texas to make this stuff ourselves because of what's happening in the geopolitical arena, right? And so if you source rare earths or, you know, components or batteries or whatever it might be from China, like, you better have a backup plan. And there are some things that you can get in other places like Vietnam, Indonesia, you know, Thailand, Japan.

And there's some places, some things that you can't and you're going to have to make yourself. And does it make sense to make them in the U.S.? Or should you actually make them in Mexico or make them somewhere else, right? It's all about transformation cost. And well, actually, you know, where do you source the components? And how are they assembled? And so there's no one-size-it's all not like, oh, yep, go ahead and just make everything in the U.S. Let's just like click the reshore button and then, you know, put a billion dollars in the ground and then it happens.

It takes time and it's all nuanced. But, you know, I'll just speak for base. I mean, we are doing as much as we can to control our destiny here and make as many of the things that are core to us that makes sense from a kind of transformation cost perspective ourselves in Texas. Now, we also highly value having engineering and manufacturing very close to each other and having this tight feedback loop and iterations and maybe not all people value that. And so they want to make stuff elsewhere and engineer it far away. And that's fine too. And I think it very much depends on the product strategy and the kind of company you're building.

So, yeah, it is a hard time to be building things because it's just always hard to build things. And, you know, I think the best thing you can do is kind of take stock of your situation relative to your company and the thing that you make and just figure out the most strategic way to control your own destiny, so to speak. I will say, it's pretty nice to have a backup plan where you can raise a billion dollars to build in Texas.

Like, that's a really nice backup plan. And what estimate to you all too? Yeah, it certainly helps. Look, we're very grateful for the support of our investors, and recent included, uh, who see this big vision. And it's not, we're not like, oh, you know, tariffs hit. We need a billion dollars because like,

our stuff's getting more expensive, right? It's like, okay, we have a plan. Here it is. This is what we're going to do. This is how we're going to do it. This is what's going to cost, right? And so we're going to execute against that plan as quickly as we can. Yeah, I want to talk a little bit more about just building in Texas because I think a couple years ago, and we talk a lot about this on the American Dynamism team, it was like everything was concentrated in California. Saying you were going to build in a new ecosystem like Austin, we're sort of seen as radical or crazy. And, like, the sort of the kind of top line kind of that everyone would say is, well, there's not enough talent. Like, you're going to have a hard time getting the engineering talent.

As you said, like, manufacturing engineering need to be near each other. How are you going to be able to do that? And so you are sort of proving all the naysayers wrong. Maybe talk about why Texas is the future and why, if we're looking 20 years out, we might see 10 new, you know, physical world ecosystems that are really benefiting from this movement. Yeah, look, I'm very biased here because I've born and raised in Austin, So this is home for me. But first of all, Austin is an amazing place to live. It's an amazing place to build a family.

It's got great schools. It's got great, you know, outdoor nature. It's got the arts. It's got music. It's got the Texas Longhorns. It's, you know, has all the charm of a small city and all the resources of a big city. It's got the restaurants. We've got barbecue.

That's important. And barbrew, right? And great Mexican food. And so the livability is extremely high. So, you know, we do a lot of relocating people to Austin, right? We're like, hey, you know, and it's a good selection. mechanism for people who are really serious because, look, we work really hard here. Like, this is an intense place to work. And if you're not willing to pick up your life and

move to Austin, like, you're probably just not the right fit for the company because it's just an intense group of people. And so we've been able to relocate a lot of people here because it's a great place to live. But the actual fundamentals of the city make it a really good place to build. It's incredibly pro-business. There's a massive, highly competent set of young college-educated people coming out of the University of Texas. Elon has built Gigafactory here, which has brought tens of thousands of incredible engineers here, many of which we've hired. And, you know, SpaceX now has a site in Bastrop. You know, Amazon and Apple and meta and, you know, all of these companies have big offices here. So it's become a technology hub.

The hiring, the local hiring pool has gotten better. Our ability to recruit people here has gone up is the city has gotten better. And as someone who grew up here and spent the last, you know, whatever 30 years here, like the next 10 years for Austin are going to be a lot better than the last 10 years. And we're kind of hitting this inflection point where it's becoming a major metro in the country. And so I'm extremely bullish on the city. And obviously our friends at Serenic are building a really incredible hardware company here.

And we're excited about what they're doing. And there's going to be more behind us that are, you know, building hard things, doing hard work here in Texas. and it's really exciting you see. So modernizing the grid is an important topic that people talk a lot about. Obviously not the sexiest topic, but, you know, I think it's pretty sexy.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, it needs to be done. What, I want to give an overview of how the grid got so bad in the first place and what needs to happen. Yeah, so the back story here is interesting and complicated. I mean, the grid was largely kind of federalized and regulated, right? Right. And, you know, in the early 1900s, when we started building out what is now a grid infrastructure, the available technology was less. Our kind of cities were more rural. You had to have like a ton of coordination to get these things done. And so you had a lot of these municipal utilities get built out. They're run by the city. And then over time, you know, you saw other parts of the economy deregulate, right? Like, you know, trucking and.

airlines and telecom, and the grid just largely didn't. And it stayed, you know, highly regulated. And I think that when you have parts of the economy that are controlled by the government, you definitely have less innovation. And so, you know, right now, on the order of 40%, 50% of grid infrastructure was built in the 60s. And so there has not been a strong incentive. when you have monopolies, you don't have competition, there's very little incentive to innovate, right?

Because there's no competition. And so you have old infrastructure where there's no incentive to upgrade it and rebuild it. And so we have a system that is basically old and too small is kind of the punchline. As I mentioned, in the early 2000s, late 90s, this deregulate the grid kind of movement started in California.

It was quickly cut off at the knees around the endron situation. Texas picked up the church deregulated and then a bunch of states in the northeast followed but it kind of stopped there and a lot of the country is still regulated and partially for good reason. I mean, I think that at least

the transmission distribution, it does make sense to have regulated monopolies in that part of the economy because it doesn't make sense to have, you know, 10 different power lines running through the neighborhood, right? So it's kind of like the roads, right? Like most roads are not privately owned. It makes sense to have these roads owned by the government but the cars that drive on them

and the kind of stores that line them are not government-owned. And it's kind of like other, you know, their proxies in the economy when you have no competition and government regulation, you don't have innovation, and you have very little incentive to upgrade.

So we have to change that. And we're starting by entering the deregulated market of Texas where there is an incentive to innovate and we are exposed to price signals. And that's why Texas has become a laboratory for energy innovation because it's a free market and you can go capture market share and profits by coming up with great technology. Now what we're doing is we're taking all the technology

that we've built over the last two and a half years in Texas, the hardware, the software, the deployment operations, and we're packaging it and bringing it to those regulated utilities across the country who are seeing this once-in-a-generation in power demand and saying, we need technology. And they know that they're not really built for R&D, right? And so they need a partner. And we show up and say, hey, we are your outsourced R&D. We have this technology that we can provide to you. It's going to help you decrease your costs and increase your reliability. I'm like, okay, that sounds pretty interesting.

So we're working on partnering with these regulated utilities. We're not here to deregulate them, right? We're here to partner with them and help them do their jobs better outside of Texas. And then the other deregulated markets, we're going to compete in the free markets, right? And I hope that other competition shows up, right? Competition is good. Competition equals lower prices and better services for consumers. And it'll help us do better at our job.

So I hope there are more energy technology companies that show up in the competitive parts of the market. and help us push us to do better and then conversely also go to the regulated parts of the market and start building technology and doing R&D on behalf of these regulated utilities. Yeah, I think it's a great explanation. I wonder if that's an inspiring and good note to try. I like the phrase about the competition is good

because zero to one got so popular, people have been less excited about competition as it relates in terms of its overall benefits to the ecosystem. So I appreciate you calling it out. Yeah, if you're going to, you know, winning in an uncompetitive market is like that is not really a thing, right? Like any good opportunity gets competed, right?

If what you're doing is actually that interesting economically and societal, like, it should be competed on, right? And someone should show up and say, hey, I want that too. Right. So, you know, right now, if he said, hey, Zach, like, who else is working on this in this way? Like, actually, there's nobody. Like, there are other people that make batteries. other people that write software for batteries,

no one has the model that we have, someone better show up soon or else like what we're doing clearly isn't working. Now, I think it's working and the market thinks it's working. The business model works and the customers love it. And so I imagine that someone will show up soon. Now, I think we've got a nice head start and, you know, we're rather competitive people.

So, you know, bring it on. But I do think that like good, you know, competitive markets are healthy. Totally. Totally. Yeah. And certainly, look forward to our friends. If you want to read more about base, Arena Mag has the definitive profile of you guys

and what we're building in Texas. Check it out this weekend. Erin, did you want to say something? Oh, I was just that you brought up Peter Thiel, Eric, and zero to one. And, you know, it's better not have a competitor than have a competitor. And I loved, I loved Zach's spicy tape. And I remember, you know, when I was at Palantier,

we talked a lot about not having a competitor. and now every company I talked to is Palantir for XYZ so I imagine we'll yeah Palantir has tons of competitors Nvidia has tons of competitors in 10 years hearing Open AI yeah

Open AI has tons of competitors Name a great business that doesn't have competition I mean yeah yeah yeah awesome well on that note Zach thanks so much for coming to the modernist situation thanks for having you guys was fun great well we're now excited to

have our second guest on the modern new situation segment Eddie Lazarin who's going to be talking to us about Who is Nick Land? Eddie, we've been looking for an excuse to bring up Nick Land in a 16Z podcast for a while now. And I think we finally found it. Tucker Carlson had a guest on the podcast, which talked about the Nickland phenomenon

in Silicon Valley and how it's inspired AI. And they're worried about, you know, it being a sort of the summoning of the demons, so to speak. There was a great profile on tablet on who is Nick Land. Nick Land also went on a podcast in this debate with the current issue of tablet. Yes. Yours. Exactly.

Pan to Catherine, Nick Land also did a debate with Alexander Dugan on Mike Tyres' podcast. So we're in the news right now, and people are asking, who is Nick Land and what is connection to Silicon Valley? Eddie, help us make sense. So I'll say, I will layer on caveat after caveat until maybe we get in an answer, right? Maybe that will, maybe that's how we'll get there. But so first, I'll say, like, I don't think people need to understand who Nick Land is anymore. than you need to understand who Deleuze and Gattari are, or who Hegel was, or who any of these somewhat inscrutable continental philosophers are, right? I don't think that you necessarily need to.

Although I think these figures do have an effect on mainstream culture. They do. It's usually through their ripple effect over layers and layers of culture as they're kind of digested and re-computed by people, right? We kind of achieve an understanding of them. So I'll say, Nick Land is that type of figure. So he's incredibly difficult to understand. Not just because he's from an intellectual school that's hard to understand, like the continental philosophers in general. But because the topics he chooses to talk about are themselves inscrutable. His writing style is inscrutable because it's sort of taking these flourishes and density from these famous, like, 20th century French philosophers and stuff like that.

Obviously, he's writing in English and he's very much in English. But all these layers make it incredibly difficult to understand who Nickland is. So first, if you have no interest in continental philosophers, if you have no interest in this type of thing, you don't need to know. You're good. Turn it off. Skip the podcast. Enjoy.

Have a good afternoon. You know, whatever. But if those types of things are interesting to you, then Nickland is very, very interesting. And I find I'm a huge fan. I find it very interesting. what makes him interesting is that he takes a lot of the most interesting post-industrial revolution themes and he modernizes them into an ultra-modern cypherpunk context right now I'm as I said he's hard to explain so I'm being really reductionistic here right and I'm overly simplifying what he is but

Nickland has had two famous phases two phases in his intellectual development which is not uncommon for people like him, people who are kind of playing in this really complex mind space and trying to make sense of things using really high-level conceptual tools. In his earlier phase, which I think is maybe exemplified by like this cool essay called Meltdown from 1994, Nick Land was taking all these themes about industrial development and capitalism

and the internet and city, and the intensity and heat and chaos and entropy of modern culture as we saw it in the 90s and in the 70s and 80s in a way we'd never seen before and he's trying to make sense of it in terms of its grand historicity. What does it mean in the big picture of the development of humanity?

And during that period, I think he was a little more cynical about capitalism. Like he kind of flipped his views on how he thought about capitalism, technological development, as something that was creating a lot of problems for people, but also something that was brimming with incredible potential. In his more recent period, maybe like since 2012-2013-ish or something like that, he has remained focused on similar themes,

but he has kind of flipped around a little bit where he sees technological development and the feedback loop of capital and technology and capital and technological. and money and capital and technology as maybe culminating a huge project. Now, whether it's a human project or whether it's a project from an AI from the future is kind of a complex idea, but gets at another theme of his, which is this esoteric mysticism. Now, I'm not a particularly esoteric mysticism type person. I actually studied philosophy in school, but I studied analytic philosophy,

which is like the boring draw math equations and logical explanations type philosopher, the type who maybe makes things clear at the expense of them being interesting, right? But the continental school, land school, is very much the opposite. And leaning maximally into interestingness, maybe at the expense of clarity, right? And I'd say that Lanz unpacking of all these ideas is often layered with his esoteric tools, right? And those are things like the numigrammer, which I regret I crunched up slightly, but it doesn't help. It wasn't going to make sense anyway, right? So I'm not going to bother to try to explain the numigram is actually a really cool three-hour, 33-minute podcast.

We'll link to it. on YouTube, where he explains it in depth. But the way that I maybe rationalize it to myself is, I think of it like that brilliant friend of yours who really does have a great grasp of people, but maybe relies on tarot as like a tool of their brilliant, otherwise brilliant, psychologically. Right, that's kind of how I think about it.

So what makes land so interesting to Silicon Valley people? Right, because that's just to push back on the Hegel or Duluth. Like, they're not people who, inspire, you know, Silk Valley in the same way. So land is more relevant and more pertinent. And that's because he takes a lot of the interesting themes from those philosophers. I'm trying to avoid getting like a little too deep

into the specifics. I can't and I'd be happy to. But he takes a lot of the themes that these philosophers talk about and he embeds them very, very specifically in technological progress. Yeah. In the internet, in what is new. He has, and I say this like very

much being a part of the crypto team and on the crypto fund, he has probably the most interesting dense treatment of Bitcoin as a philosophical object that has ever been written for sure. I've found super, super interesting and always seems to surprise me with ideas when I go back to it. It's like a 150 page book or so, right? So part of what makes his appeal so great is specifically embedding these things in contemporary technological themes and developments, as opposed to kind of waving the hand and looking

I would describe most philosophers as kind of looking at technological progress as like, well, look, they're making more stuff faster. You know, like, okay, they made the pin factory ten times cheaper. Wow, those industrialists, you know. Whereas I think land identifies a qualitative change, right? In technological progress, we see something maybe almost spooky. And I think that that's where that spookiness is what Tucker's guest was correctly identifying. Now, I think his analysis was maybe not the way that I see land. And I think there was a lot of projection from his personal analysis of things.

I think that I really, I thought it was very entertaining and fun, but the truth is I don't think it was particularly accurate. But he is correctly picking up, at least, on the spookiness, right? There is something a little bit spooky sometimes about the rate that technological progress compounds and the way that it maybe erodes as the same time that it adds on to the human condition. And I think that makes it really interesting. Now, I'll say just to maybe situate the prompt about Silicon Valley a little bit more specifically, I don't actually know that many people in Silicon Valley who like Nick Land. I'm going to be honest.

It's not like you go around the streets of San Francisco. and you talk to people, this really cool book, this compilation of Land's blog posts from Passage Press, came out. I think last year. That's what I was going to ask because I, you know, I first, I feel like Nick Land's a name you've heard if you've been in Silicon Valley, but it's also a name you've heard if you've been in certain circles online.

And I think the passage press point is a very good point, right? Like they published Ceno Systems. I'd love to get into what that is and why it's important. But on the online right, he's also a figure that people care about. And now that he's sort of mainstreamed into the mainstream online right with Tucker, curious why you think those worlds are colliding. Because his work, and again, I think the tablet piece that came out a couple weeks ago goes through like the entire history of what he's done,

he's not really a typical like American right figure, right? Like he doesn't really fit in that context. He was, you know, at the, at the, it was at University of Warwick. Was that in England? And then he moved to Shanghai, right? Like, he's not really part of American politics or American culture. Yet he's had an influence on these kind of very small pockets.

So I would just be curious. Maybe we'd start with What is Zeno Systems and the book from Passage Press. And then how does he fit into all of these weird subcultures in a peculiar way, but doesn't necessarily, you know, as you said, you'd be hard pressed to find someone in Silicon Valley who's read a lot of Nick Klan's work. Yeah, no, yeah, I don't, I really, honestly, I don't, of course I don't mean this in a disparaging way. I don't really see Nick Land's ideas as being, like, broadly influential in Silicon Valley in the way maybe they were characterized in the Tucker Brock.

But there's kind of this, the accelerationist, the leading to, yeah. Yeah, so distillations of some of the ideas that have been kind of, like, reimagined and digested, have made their way in. And part of that is because, and this is, I'm going to, maybe this is a funny way to try to put it, is that Nick Land's work is very vibey. Yeah, okay. It's really vibey. Okay, if you go look at that meltdown piece from 94, you look at a random essay from Xenosystems. Like, he has a intense prosaic writing style that is provocative, intentionally inflammatory, not inflammatory, intentionally grandiose, right? And he can create a lot of imagery in his work. So the way he describes acceleration is it's more than just like making the pins faster and cheaper. Acceleration is like almost in, you know, it's like a world-changing project, right? He describes Bitcoin as like maybe the most profound thing that's happened on the internet, right? Like he has incredible theater to what he says. That comes from the Continental School.

So people have taken that and really enjoyed that, right? Like, I think if you read any of his stuff, you'll see that. So like, what is Zeno systems and so on? So I'll say his presence in the online right, Xenosystems, on the online right he is a very he he got there in an interesting way right i i think uh if people are kind of familiar with horseshoe theory right right uh land was not has not always been like a figure on the right in fact many have described his earlier phase with the uh with the with the ccr u kind of this like uh rag tag very interesting very uh artistically uh sensitive uh

writing group basically art group i think of them as an art group at least uh they would have described them as actually on the far left right as a far on the anti-capitalist left and his arrival on the right was kind of jumping across the gap in the horseshoe so to speak yeah a very good friend of mine a philosopher who is who identifies as more of a communist a college friend of mine he says like i often feel like when i read nick land that i could like reach across and like kiss him over the the in the horseshoe, right? So he's a, I wouldn't say that he's a representative figure of Silicon Valley. I don't think that's, I don't think Silicon Valley is like this, right?

But he is a fantastic poster and very insightful and cutting and controversial. And I think that that has made him very exciting and very interesting to the right, to the online right, recently, because the online right doesn't really have this type of voice, right? someone with, you know, deep in the continental weeds, so to speak. And so what explains his shift from left to right, basically? You know, it's funny. He hasn't really explained that himself, right? Nick, Nick Land, I mean, if you read his themes, it's not like the subject of his attention

has changed totally. It has certainly evolved, and there's all kinds of things he posts about and talks about today that he in the past. So he has certainly evolved, but he kind of disappeared for a while. and then he just kind of came back and everything had changed right and now he just writes from that perspective

very I can say the types of things that he believes right you know like he's very preoccupied with liberalism when I say liberalism I mean in the European sense right where like big capital L liberalism like you know right liberals and left liberals

being like generally the American political landscape right in the freedom you know individual sense. He's very preoccupied with like liberalism in the West and like what that means and how it has evolved and in particular how it has pathologized in some ways and evolved into like contemporary progressivism, which he sees as like not just its own kind of isolated political system, but as something that is clearly identifiable as an evolution of, of Protestantism, of, of older liberalism of the change in the makeup of the of the of the western electorate and so on

but the debate he was having with dougan was whether um that's kind of endemic to liberalism or whether that was just a you know mutation but unnecessarily inherent to the form yeah yeah so types of themes are part of why he's uh also so interesting to the right because i think a lot of people on the online right today and i don't mean like the whole right remember i'm speaking in generalities, obviously, but I'm talking about the type of people who are very interested in trying to take a diagnostic lens to what has happened in American politics and American culture over the last 20, 30 years, maybe in light of the Internet specifically, and trying to understand it in its big historical frame, right? And that's an interesting project. It's a difficult project.

I don't pretend that he has the answers necessary. I don't think he would even. I mean, he's trying I understand it. It makes them interesting. Yeah. No, I just thought the Tucker podcast was fascinated how it sort of brought together these sort of weird cultural things. Again, if you're truly monitoring the situation, there are things happening across the internet, like discussion of revelation, the Antichrist, and really linking Nick Land and accelerationism to sort of this bigger question of, are we at the end of the world? And I'm very curious, was that more of like the Tucker framing of it or is that like actually part of land's work that we hit I mean I know he's he's talked a lot about singularity and sort of these forces coming together yeah I've never I've never thought of his work is like end of the world project so I'm curious how it's getting lumped yeah I mean he does see history as this grand project right he is very preoccupied with the shape of history and the shape of time a lot of really interesting crazy sci-fi themes in there but I don't really I you know he he's somebody that I'm sure could hold a conversation about like the Antichrist and so on and eschatology in the Western tradition. That is something he's

talked about now and then, but I don't see that as a key theme in his works. And like, you know, as an example, that's not a key theme in Zeno systems, right? Like the book that like kind of has reignited some interest and some attention in his work. You know, I say this. I'm not, this is not like a content warning. I'm not that, but, but, you know, I'd say if you're the type of person that wants to clutch their pearls and get upset about, like, things that you read, then don't read xenosystems, right? But if you're the type of person that wants to read a wide array of ideas from someone whose dedication as a philosopher to unfettered idea work, and you can appreciate that sort of sloppiness and craziness of someone who's really trying to think through things, then I think that it's a really interesting piece from a perspective that is pretty uncommon. Yeah. The one thing that really came out from a lot of the conversations and discourse happening this week on him is like, I actually don't think Silicon Valley has its own philosophical community. Like there aren't like you can't point to someone in Silicon Valley and say this is the key philosopher because most people in Silicon Valley are doers and they're building things and they have a very different way of how they interact with whether it's their art or their projects. And so I guess is part of this that we just lack such a philosophical question. culture, that maybe he's getting credit for something that's very, very distinct.

I agree with that. I think that's a great read. And in fact, I'd extend that read, something that's been, I'm amazed to mention this on a podcast. This is kind of like an Eddie shower thought here, right? But like, but for some time, because I told you, I did philosophy in school. It's been like a long time interest of mine, right? I kind of have this like lingering belief, you know, not something I'm totally sure about,

but like a feeling that I think a lot of the great philosophers, were epiphenomenal to use a philosophy word, which means that their work was sort of capturing what was already in the spirit of the culture that they were occupying and that they may have made, and in a lot of their works,

this is not always the case, but a lot of the time, we're actually doing a brilliant job capturing the spirit of the times and capturing what thinkers were working on. And we look back on them as causal, right, as having caused those periods. But in fact, they're just taking a beautiful crystallized snapshot that now becomes, you know,

retroactively representative of that period. Yes. I think moving to Silicon Valley gave me conviction in this belief. Because I thought of when I came to Silicon Valley in 2011, when I came by, I thought that to embark on such grand projects, I always heard about. the incredible ambition of Silicon Valley, you know. That was always something that stuck out to me, like the massive, the willingness to change the world, this sort of craziness. I thought of this as something that required a distinctly philosophical motivation, if not a spiritual motivation.

I thought of it as something that required this. And so I thought that when I came to Silicon Valley, I'd meet a bunch of people who adhered to very specific, you know, explicitly held in their hearts these types of systems. And they don't at all. right they don't at all and what what actually is the case is that people live in this it's like a fish in water right they just kind of like swim in this culture and some people can are so good at getting a little grip on it and and like capturing it in words it's spirit in words the aphorisms if not full fully developed philosophical treaties right uh and and land captures some of that some of the i would say the kind of more some of the most extreme and interesting cypherpunk elements of it for sure and he has

gone on an interesting evolutionary journey that many have in their reaction to the internet but i don't see it as causal right i don't think people are acting out developing AI following nick land like that's that's honestly absurd to me but instead nick lands like profound enthusiasm about it and his seeing extreme consequences in its development is something that a lot of people in Silicon Valley share for a variety of other reasons. Yeah. One thing I think he's also very good at that Silicon Valley actually understands and sort of the builder culture versus the thinking culture is he's extremely good at memes and extremely

good at naming things. And Silicon Valley cares about that, right? So it's like, of course, accelerationism is like a beautiful, it's a beautiful concept, there's a beautiful word, and it's also something that sticks, right? Like, we need those words. So I guess there's something about that, too, where we're so devoid as an ecosystem of writers and thinkers because people don't come to Silicon Valley to write.

They come to Silicon Valley to build. And if you come as a writer, you get co-opted into some aspect of our ecosystem where you're not writing in many ways. It just, it feels like he's kind of connected at places where, you know, our world actually understands certain parts of the language. even if we don't understand the actual doctrines. Oh, totally, totally.

And some people make this critique that they say, hey, accelerationism, some people had this view that it was kind of like, you know, burn it all down, but we needed to, things needed to be burned down to get better and sort of accelerate that. That's like one branch of it. Yeah. But that we've sort of, Silicon Valley sort of adopted that to mean, that term accelerationism, but in a more positive, like, you know,

build up in some sense. And some people would critique and say, oh, because we're doing that, we're like, we don't quite understand the original philosophy or something. But maybe in fact, we're just using it for our own purposes, you know. Yeah, well, but the history of thought is full of these types of versions, of co-opting, like, left accelerationism, right, which is like this idea that you heighten the contradictions of capitalism by, like,

being faster, bigger, make the pin factory a thousand times bigger, make the planet a pin factory, right? And then, like, it will eventually detonate and then we can return. to whatever communist think. But then, of course, right acceleration. In fact, I'd say I think there's a lot of nuance in right acceleration. There are some people who think that it leads to kind of a bizarre cataclysm. And there are, in a good way, whatever that means.

And then there are some people that think of it as just a fundamentally productive project. Yeah. Right. It's like abundance creates abundance, creates abundance, right? Acceleration creates acceleration. And we've enjoyed these fruits so far. Why not more? Yeah. So could I ask, you know, for people who have heard a couple podcasts this week and are like, actually, I'm really interested. For the novice, where do you begin? What's the most interesting work to dive into first? Like where would your sort of Eddie's tour of Nick Land begin?

Well, like I said at the beginning, the truth is you don't need to understand Nick Land. It's okay. Turn off the podcast, touch grass, and do your thing. You don't need to. Show us the picture again. Just show us the picture. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Do you really? want to understand this. Do you really want to understand the new room? It's the, it's sunny in Philadelphia of Danny DeVia. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't think you do. But if you, but if you really do want to understand these types of things, like I'd say bring, bring an LLM along to support you because it's all kind, it's a very dense,

his work is very, very dense, full of references to other philosophers and specific phrases and framings. I think Zeno Systems is a great place to start. If you want to just get the vibe, I think that meltdown essay is really good. It's, you know, again, content warning or whatever. But I think that that's a great way to get the vibe. Yeah, I think that's, I mean, I could say more. Maybe I'll put some links in the notes. He's also great on podcasts. He's such a, it's so funny, we hear this. I remember the first time I heard of him like 15 years ago or so. I, I remember

he was explained to me as a menacing figure almost, which is incredible in retrospect. But if you listen to him on one of the podcasts, he's like the most gentle guy. It's like the sweetest guy. He's like literally the sweetest guy. I can't even, I mean, I've never, I've never met him, but he seems like a very clear, a very clear, very careful, very deliberate with his words type of guy. I think you'll enjoy it. You might have to play things at 1.5x. That's not, I, I recommend the same thing for my, my stuff, my videos for what it's worth. But yeah, I think just, you know, just dive in. And I think I've been pretty impressed candidly with the, the ways LLMs, especially when you give them some think time and you let them look at some links,

they do a really good job of putting things into a very legible form. I think it's a good place to wrap. Eddie, thanks for coming off. Thanks so much for coming. Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcast, and Spotify.

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