Venture capitalist and All In Podcast co-host Jason Calacanis joined Adam Curry on episode 1905 of the No Agenda Show, titled 'Nerdballs,' published September 20, 2026, for a pointed deconstruction of the AI hype cycle, Silicon Valley power politics, and the media narratives shaping the 2026 midterms. Broadcasting from the Texas Hill Country, Curry introduced Calacanis as 'the get of the week,' fresh from an All In Summit that drew 3,000 attendees and surprise call-ins from President Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Elon Musk, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
Calacanis trained his sharpest criticism on Anthropic, the AI safety-focused lab behind the Claude models. 'They actually think that they are creating a god. They're not. They're creating software,' he told Curry, comparing the company's effective-altruism roots to the doomed engineers in the film Prometheus. Curry played clips of University of Washington professor Pedro Domingos describing a reported Anthropic 'funeral' for a retired Claude model. Calacanis insisted the real story is regulatory capture: frontier labs lobbying Washington to gate open-source competitors like DeepSeek, GLM, and NeMoTron. The discussion also touched on Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman's new code of conduct and his public criticism of Anthropic's 'model welfare' doctrine.
The episode covered a range of other flashpoints. Curry and Calacanis unpacked a reported Hugging Face security incident and calls for an AI 'kill switch,' the political weaponization of data centers by candidates like Texas Democrat James Talarico, Trump's revocation of press credentials for CNN, MSNOW, and Politico, and rising diesel prices tied to Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries. Calacanis also shared backstage detail from the All In Summit, recounting Jensen Huang fumbling the speakerphone button when President Trump called mid-panel and describing pressing Meta's Dina about the company's record $17 billion settlement during a data-center segment.
For business and technology leaders, the conversation signals several emerging risks. The regulatory capture argument suggests that frontier AI labs may use safety rhetoric to entrench their market positions, potentially stifling open-source innovation from global competitors. The political backlash against data centers could raise operating costs and slow infrastructure buildout, directly affecting cloud and AI capacity planning. Meanwhile, the reported Hugging Face security incident and kill-switch proposals highlight growing pressure for security standards and government intervention in AI systems.
Calacanis also revealed the origin story of All In as a pandemic-era poker group with David Sacks, Chamath Palihapitiya, and David Friedberg, and noted that This Week in Startups sells out its ad inventory a year in advance at $3,000 per spot. Curry pivoted to Bitcoin, predicting a $430,000 peak, while Calacanis discussed parenting in the smartphone era. The pair reflected on the late John C. Dvorak, whose memory drives the show's ongoing Order of the Ant tribute campaign.
The episode, available wherever podcasts are heard, offers a skeptical lens on AI's most powerful players and the political forces reshaping the industry ahead of the 2026 midterms.
