The latest episode of the No Agenda Show, titled 'Nerdballs' and published on September 20, 2026, features host Adam Curry in conversation with venture capitalist and All In Podcast co-host Jason Calacanis. The episode serves as a sharp critique of the AI hype cycle, Silicon Valley power dynamics, and the media narratives influencing the 2026 midterms. Calacanis, described by Curry as 'the get of the week,' brings fresh insights from the All In Summit at the Shrine Auditorium, which attracted 3,000 attendees and surprise call-ins from President Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Elon Musk, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
The discussion covers a range of pressing issues, including Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman's new code of conduct and his criticism of Anthropic's 'model welfare' doctrine, the reported Hugging Face security incident, and calls for an AI 'kill switch.' Calacanis does not hold back on the AI safety debate, arguing that Anthropic's leadership has convinced itself it is creating 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, while Calacanis insists the real story is regulatory capture: frontier labs lobbying Washington to gate open-source competitors like DeepSeek, GLM, and NeMoTron.
The episode also touches on the political weaponization of data centers by candidates such as 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 provides rare backstage detail from the All In Summit, recounting Jensen Huang fumbling the speakerphone button when President 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. This episode matters because it offers a contrarian take on the AI arms race, challenging the narrative that AI safety concerns are purely altruistic. Instead, Calacanis and Curry suggest that regulatory capture and media manipulation are the real forces at play, with significant implications for open-source innovation, tech policy, and the upcoming midterms. Their skepticism of Anthropic's 'model welfare' doctrine and the push for AI kill switches underscores a broader debate about who controls the future of artificial intelligence.
