Big Beautiful Bill, Elon/Trump, Dollar Down Big, Harvard's Money Problems, Figma IPO

The episode opens with a plug for the All-In Summit, which the host says returns in September for its fourth year. He jokes that he is "doing Friedberg's job for him because he's been a little bit busy." The banter turns to the show's habit of announcing speakers early. One participant complains that every year the show names people who then don't come. Another answers that they "got Elon to go three out of three years" and promises this year will be "better than ever."

The hosts also promote their tequila venture. One mentions that MSN covered him sending a case to Bezos. Orders have been heavy enough that customer support is running behind. The tequila is sold at tequila.allin.com, and deliveries are expected to begin in late summer, around the time of the summit.

The rest of the opening is personal. Some of the hosts spent the weekend in Las Vegas with about 20 friends. Another was whitewater rafting on the Snake River with family. He describes multi-night trips where you camp along the river and go days without a shower, and he calls the scenery "absolutely stunning." The talk drifts to the Idaho–Oregon border, Snake River Farms and premium steak cuts before the hosts move on to the news.

The first news item is the Senate's passage of the "big beautiful bill" on Tuesday, after an all-night session and more than twenty-four hours of deliberation. The vote was a fifty-fifty tie, which JD Vance broke. Three Republicans voted no. Trump won over Senator Ron Johnson, who had said on the show that he would vote no unless more spending was cut. The Senate made significant changes, so the bill has to pass the House again before Trump can sign it.

Trump set a July 4 deadline, which is the day the episode was published. The host cites Polymarket odds: a 96% chance the bill passes by Thursday and 97% by Friday, July 4. He concludes that passage "looks like it's pretty much a lock."

The host calls the removal of the ten-year moratorium on state AI regulation the biggest Senate change. Ted Cruz tried to negotiate it down to five years. The host says he had suggested that himself, since ten years may have been too long for some people, but the compromise failed. He cites the National Conference of State Legislatures, which counts more than a thousand AI-related bills filed by state lawmakers in 2025. His conclusion is to "expect a lot of state by state AI regulation."

The host notes that Sacks is not on this episode to discuss AI regulation. He frames the moratorium as a states'-rights question, comparing it to fights over abortion, guns, and cannabis. He asks whether states should have a say in how AI is deployed within their borders, or whether the federal government should take over, and if so for how long.

The first answer argues for federal preemption while still endorsing the federated structure of the republic. In this view, AI clearly crosses state lines: it involves interstate commerce, international commerce and the open Internet. The speaker cites, with some hedging, "70 state laws or statutes passed thus far" and "over a thousand having been proposed to date if the numbers are right." The argument is that a patchwork of rules on model development, or on what software companies may deploy, would make it practically impossible for providers like Google or OpenAI to serve customers across states. That would hurt consumers and the job market.

The same speaker uses California's early legislation, which Gavin Newsom did not sign, as an example of naive rulemaking. That bill used model parameters as the threshold for regulatory review. The speaker calls this "such a naive assertion that early in the phase of AI technology development," because it assumed everything is an LLM. It ignored vision-action models for robotics and models that control physical systems such as self-driving cars. The broader worry is that regulators who "don't fully understand the breadth of the technology" will write narrow rules.

Even though I generally agree that states should be able to self govern, this just has too much of a interstate and global interaction.

This speaker calls losing the AI preemption the biggest disappointment of the bill's negotiations. They describe it as probably the provision most important to the U.S. economy, because of its effects on job creation, GDP and productivity growth.

The host then pushes on the abortion comparison: after that issue went to the states, the rules now differ widely between states such as Texas and Oklahoma. The response rejects the analogy. Abortion is described as an individual matter between a woman, her doctor, her partner and her God, so state-level rules plus the freedom to travel between states are "quite reasonable." AI is treated as a different kind of issue: one of national security, "the tip of the spear" of technological and therefore economic supremacy.

And it makes as much sense for states to legislate AI as it would make sense for states to have competitive armies.

This speaker grants that some state concerns are legitimate. They mention child-safety issues raised by several states and Tennessee's concerns about copyright for musicians and their content. Their position is that these could have been handled inside a federal framework. The risk they see in 50 sets of rules, plus advocacy groups appearing in every state, is that startups and smaller companies will be slowed down because they lack the money to fight or comply. A handful of incumbents would benefit, even though, in the speaker's words, "our incumbents aren't yet mature, and this industry is still developing." They call this an unfortunate part of "what is otherwise a a pretty reasonable bill."

The host offers counterexamples. Online gambling, cannabis and psychedelics are all being settled state by state, with federal rules possibly coming later. Another participant objects that those are individual-rights issues and AI is not. They add that even individual choices such as taking drugs are still governed by federal FDA rules that states cannot get around. The host replies that federal non-enforcement is at the center of the cannabis debate.

The host explicitly presents the next argument as his reading of the other side, not his own view: "I'm not saying this is my position." Because "AI means everything" and will affect states differently, supporters of state regulation may want states to work out the specific issues first and build toward a national framework later. He compares this to Section 230. He admits he doesn't know its full history, but notes that federal law kept the early Internet from being split into a different set of rules for each platform, such as AOL or GeoCities.