Venture capitalist and All In Podcast co-host Jason Calacanis joined Adam Curry on episode 1905 of the No Agenda Show to deconstruct the AI panic, Silicon Valley power politics, and the media narratives shaping the 2026 midterms. The episode, titled "Nerdballs," published September 20, 2026, matters because it offers a rare, unfiltered critique of the AI safety debate from a prominent investor, challenging the narrative that frontier labs are acting in humanity's best interest.
Calacanis pulls no punches on Anthropic's "model welfare" doctrine, arguing that the company's leadership has convinced itself it is birthing a deity. "They actually think that they are creating a god. They're not. They're creating software," he tells Curry, comparing the company's effective-altruism roots to the doomed engineers in the film Prometheus. Curry plays clips of University of Washington professor Pedro Domingos describing a reported Anthropic "funeral" for a retired Claude model, underscoring the quasi-religious fervor that critics say has overtaken parts of the AI safety movement. Calacanis insists the real story is regulatory capture: frontier labs lobbying Washington to gate open-source competitors like DeepSeek, GLM, and NeMoTron. If those efforts succeed, the implications for innovation and competition in the AI sector could be severe, entrenching a handful of players and shutting out smaller developers.
The conversation also touches on Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman's new code of conduct and his public criticism of Anthropic's approach, the reported Hugging Face security incident, and calls for an AI "kill switch." These developments, Calacanis suggests, are being used to justify preemptive regulation that would benefit incumbents. The political weaponization of data centers by candidates like Texas Democrat James Talarico, along with Trump's revocation of press credentials for CNN, MSNOW, and Politico, and rising diesel prices tied to Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries, round out a wide-ranging discussion that connects technology, energy, and media power.
Calacanis also delivers rare backstage detail from the All In Summit at the Shrine Auditorium, which drew 3,000 attendees and surprise call-ins from President Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Elon Musk, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. He recounts Huang fumbling the speakerphone button when Trump called mid-panel and describes pressing Meta's Dina about the company's record $17 billion settlement during a data-center segment. He shares the origin story of All In as a pandemic-era poker group with David Sacks, Chamath Palihapitiya, and David Friedberg, and reveals that This Week in Startups sells out its ad inventory a year in advance at $3,000 per spot.
Curry pivots to Bitcoin, predicting a $430,000 peak, while Calacanis discusses parenting in the smartphone era. The pair also reflect on the late John C. Dvorak, whose memory drives the show's ongoing Order of the Ant tribute campaign. For listeners, the episode provides a counterweight to mainstream AI coverage, highlighting how safety concerns can be weaponized to stifle competition and concentrate power among a few well-connected firms.
