Apple’s New CEO & Mayor Mamdani’s Business Council 9/1/26

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0:42Don't just launch AI, land it. Because when AI delivers results, it's amazing. We configure, optimize, and deliver the tech that runs business. CDW, make amazing happen. Bring in show music, please. Hi, I'm CNBC producer Katie Kramer. Today on Squawk Pod. Legendary investor David Booth has some advice for the rest of us. Stay calm and stay invested.

1:13David Booth:Human ingenuity, that human spirit will get us back on track faster than you might think, which is what happened. The recession was like one quarter. New York Mayor Zoran Mamdani has a complicated relationship with the local business community. Now he's gathering them for an advisory council. Member Scott Reckler of real estate firm RxR. We're not going to always agree on everything, but I'd rather have a seat at the table and engage. Reckler was not a supporter of Mamdani throughout his campaign, but he sees this as a civic duty to sit at that table. They're focused on the issues that are important to the city, and the city's thriving.

1:48And I think that's an important point here, right? Those conversations plus Anthropics'$35 billion data center deal. And Apple's Tim Cook hands over the reins to John Ternus after 15 years of thinking different. The one thing that you can't go without, if you forget your phone, you'll turn around and go home to get it. It's Tuesday, September 1st, 2026. Squawk Pod begins right now. Stand Becky by in three, two, one. Cue, please. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Squawk Box right here on CNBC. We are live from the NASDAQ market site in Times Square. I'm Becky Quick, along with Joe Kernan and Andrew Ross Sorkin.

2:29Thanks, Becky. Meantime, a big day. Apple hardware chief John Ternus taking over from Tim Cook as CEO. It's happening today after a long tenure for Tim Cook at the company. Cook spending 15 years in the role as CEO. He took over, if you remember, back from Steve Jobs back in the summer of 2011. I don't think people were expecting what ultimately happened. Apple's stock has now risen more than 2 ,200 percent since then. And under Cook, well, all sorts of things have happened. We should probably go through some of the list. Apple became the first company with a trillion-dollar market cap, an extraordinary milestone for that company.

3:16It now stands, by the way, at more than$4.6 billion, or I should say billion. This is where we are, guys. $4.6 trillion. Apple also launched its watch at one time, if you remember, the AirPods, while Cook was CEO, and brought some major updates to the iPhone, and Cook will become Apple's executive chairman going forward. That starts next week. As part of all of this, the company expected to unveil its new iPhone. We're expecting that to take place on the 8th of this month, including a new foldable phone. I have to say, I don't know of all the devices that came out during this period, guys. It was the AirPods.

3:57And I remember being with Tim and asking him. He was showing me the AirPods. And I said, people are going to use these without the cords? and you're going to charge like$170 for them? That must be like the price you'll start at and you'll be coming down. And he looked at me and said, no. And, well, you know the history. It's pretty extraordinary. Just the idea that this company became the second largest company on his watch under market cap, and at times actually the largest company in the world in terms of market cap. Watching what they did with services, it wasn't just the devices that they were bringing on.

4:36It was the services and the constant payment that all of us who are in the Apple ecosystem are willing to pay to make sure we keep access to our photos, to the music and everything else that goes along and storing all of it in their cloud. And there's no flying cars equipped with Apple TVs. Yeah, it doesn't matter. And the Apple TV is not an Apple. It is. It's great. But it's not an Apple TV. It's amazing what they did just making things better. No, no, you know, locking us in. It never got that that unbelievable, you know, just. And he still was able to say, and there's this, you know what I mean?

5:16I think even though there never was any of this, it was all still really good, really good. And the phones are just sick. I mean, if we had if I had any idea, you know, I'm old enough to remember not even having a flip phone. And what what you can if I have any question about anything, I could be, well, when was that? What did they do? You are walking around with the greatest library on your back, basically. And as you've mentioned. Like Alexandria on your back. The one thing that we would, yeah, that's true, Alexandria on your back. But the one thing that you can't go without, if you forget your phone, you'll turn around and go home to get it.

5:51It's a bad feeling. I wish I didn't have something like this. It's like, let's see, my heart medicine is over. I don't have any heart medicine. But if I did, my heart medicine is that way. my phone's this way. I'm headed for the phone. I'll take my chances with the crazy. And hats off to him. I mean, people thought that he would never be able to fill the room. Now I can't imagine him not in that role. Do either of you ever have dreams of the phones not working? I have them all. GPS, I can't get it. You have way more dreams. You're taking too much melatonin. Must be that stupid Andrew's melatonin that he's got me addicted to.

6:25I have these dreams where my GPS won't work or the phone number won't work or just, you never have those, Andrew? It's very, I have a lot of anxiety. You've got to come down. I think you're taking too much. Five milligrams? Keep it to one milligram, maybe three, but after that, limit down. I took none last night, but I think there was some leftover from the night before. So you had dreams again last night? Oh, yeah. And a phone one, where I could not. I don't even remember any dreams. I don't. Have you ever seen where your keyboard, you're hitting it and like crazy X, all the weird symbols come up and it's like not letters.

7:04That can happen sometimes. I mean, the dreams I do have are like forgetting that I signed up for a college class. Oh, yeah. I have that. Oh, I haven't been in a class. I'm showing up just in time for the class. Three months worth of classes. And I got to find another way of getting that credit. And I'm not going to graduate. So I don't know. But here we are. Yeah. Treasury Secretary Scott Besson pushing back on some criticism from his investing mentor, Stanley Druckenmiller. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed a week ago, Druckenmiller called the Treasury Department's recent decision to ramp up government debt repurchases a mistake.

7:43And here's Besson speaking to CNBC's Sarah Eisen at the G20 Finance Minister's meeting in North Carolina. Stan's a great investor. But what I would point out is that, again, the U.S. bond market has been the best performing market since the president came in. But that doesn't say much because all bond yields have been rising around the globe.

8:07David Booth:Not in the U.S. They're flat since the president came in. Got it. Have you talked to Stan since he put that out there? I have. And how did that go? It was fine. Look, Stan's a great investor. He changes his mind a lot. And he doesn't like losing money. I think he lost money the day he sent in the editorial. Probably true. If you like losing money, there's something wrong with you. Besant told CNBC he's spoken with Druckenmiller since his op-ed was published. And as you just heard, I want to emphasize the way the way he said that the conversation went fine. In case you weren't listening to what he said, I'm going to repeat it to you.

8:49Didn't he just say that? He did. Okay. But you said it like this. I said it like this. Like the Madness, FedEx commercial from 20 years ago. All right. Was it that long ago? No, probably not. Probably 10.

9:05Anthropic reportedly signing now a$35 billion deal. This is a pretty extraordinary one with cloud provider Lambda, which now counts NVIDIA. This is the interesting part as one of its backers. So you can look at both, well, really focus on the NVIDIA portion of this. The Wall Street Journal is saying that Bitcoin miner HUT8 developing a data center in South Texas that will hold the lease on that facility. Now, Lambda is a so-called neocloud. These are providers that effectively focus on AI workloads. So it's not clear how much Lambda will ultimately pay for NVIDIA for access to those data centers.

9:42It's a complicated arrangement in part to give non-investment grade Anthropic effectively access to what is otherwise pretty expensive computing. And so that's what this deal ultimately is in large part about. It's a way to try to help start up a Lambda, secure a lucrative contract with Anthropic without procuring the data center space on its own, Joe. Yeah, I may need to pay. Andrew, I'm going to talk at the end. You'll see what I'm talking about. But the debate about U.S. data center construction is getting heated on TrueSocial. Yesterday, President Trump blasted cities coming out against the build-out.

10:23He said the only reason the communities throughout the USA should not want data centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor. If they want to be successful and rich with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let the data reign. The good news is that there are plenty of other places that want them. If we kill the golden goose, you will only have yourselves to blame. China could not be happier with this anti-data center movement. Actually, they believe they can't believe it's happening. President D.J.T. and he called it a golden goose. It's actually a goose that lays golden eggs.

10:56I always make that mistake, too. The journal remarkably actually coming to Trump's defense, says thank you for finally speaking up and saying that please keep it up. The president rightly notes it has to do with the Chinese Communist Party. And it actually is pretty interesting, this journal piece. There's already 5 ,000 or so data centers. And they went to one place in Loudoun County, Data Center Alley. And they did a calculation that if they got rid of all the data centers, that homeowners would need to pay$5 ,800 more a year in property taxes for the same government services. Some of the teachers there got$50 ,000 bonuses.

11:39I'm, I'm, uh, Andrew, I got a new ax to grind. I think we need more data centers because I keep getting wrong answers. And what, what bothers me, maybe I'm not paying up with Anthropic or something. No, I'm not kidding. But it, it makes me mad because I like Claude, you know, and he likes me. He's very nice. You're buddies. You're buddies. But why do they give you a definitive answer? Like, they may know nothing, but they're never in doubt. They remind me of some people that irritates me. And then if you ask them, they quickly say, oh, you're right to point that out. I actually checked and actually looked instead of just assuming, which makes an ass out of me and Claude.

12:22And they, why does that happen? So it's happening about half the time with me, Sorkin. Do I need to pay up? Am I got the crappy model? I must have the crappy. Part of it's the pay. Part of it's the pay issue because you're probably on a lower model that's probably working too fast. It's basically just running off of what it's learned and trained on as opposed to going out and thinking and going to search to go find the answer. You could also, if you paid, and maybe even if you don't pay, I think you could instruct it on a permanent basis on the back end to say, for every query, go out and look for the answer.

13:01Actually try and figure out the right answer instead of making it up. Oftentimes, if you put it on, so I will sometimes, and this is on ChatGPT, you could put it on instant, medium, or high. If you're getting an instant or medium answer, it's oftentimes just trying to figure it, give you whatever it can quickly. If you put it on high, it'll take a while to sometimes come back with the answer, but it will typically come back with a better answer. So all of this is about sort of tweaking how you're doing it. Google AI got it, did not give me the wrong answer. It's because a Google search a lot of times is smarter.

13:38You don't want them making assumptions and trying to figure things out. Joe asked it some, he told me the specific questions. A couple of them, yeah. I asked a couple of questions where they said, oh, I didn't realize the name was the same. I assumed it was a different person. You don't need a computer making dumb assumptions. Yeah, and telling me for sure. I once had a doctor that, you know, there's some really unpleasant procedures that men have at times. And he said, I need to do this. And I go, oh, I really don't want you to do that. And he goes, oh, okay. And I go, what do you mean, oh, okay?

14:09I'm complaining, but if you need to do it. Was this for you or for me that you were, you know? And that's the experience you get with it. Can I just add with the data centers? Oh, go ahead. I'm going to pay up, Andrew, if you can lend me the money. No, all I was going to say is one way to think about it is, you know, sometimes somebody will answer you instantly, and it's basically saying, off the top of my head, this is what I think. So if you're on a setting where it's going to do it off the top of his head, it's oftentimes going to be wrong. If you say, give me a minute, it may get better. That's sort of a mental model.

14:47I want to get what Becky's got to say about data centers. How about more data centers? The only thing I'll say with data centers, I don't want one in my backyard either. It's the basic NIMBY problem. No one's putting one in Haworth. Yeah, I know. There's all this land. But I understand communities that have some pushback for it, and part of it is the noise level. Inside the facility, the sound levels typically range from 75 to 96 decibels. It's as loud as running a vacuum cleaner, a power lawnmower, or a subway train. At the property line, noise drops to between 40 and 80 decibels. But at peak spikes, when they really have to step up the power, backup power testing can push noise levels past 100 decibels, which is similar to the sound of a lot of motorcycles.

15:27Why does it need to be near any, I mean, with the land we have in this country? You've driven out across the country. It's empty. But the pushback that you get. More than 70 % of American voters don't want one near them. Well, that's what Bernie Sanders started with superstition. But I get it. I understand why you don't want anyone in your backyard. You can think that, yes, this is good for the country, but I don't want one necessarily near me. It's the problem you have with every Nibu issue, whether it be nuclear power. You can have a Superfund plant. That's what someone said to me now. We'll give you a nuclear waste site.

16:00Right. But it's really very quiet. It's not humming or anything. Your body's just... I get it. I get the pushback. And you understand why... We got to do it. Trump, for once, Andrew, he's right. I'm channeling you. He's right. I do think we got to do it. But I also, I'm sympathetic with Becky's position. Because in New York City, hard to do this next to my apartment, if you will. But I agree. It's easy for us to say, hey, move forward. It's not going to be in our back. We need nuclear power plants, too, in Haworth. Right. That too. That too. Cheese will be next. Coming up on Squawk Pod legendary investor David Booth.

16:44He helped create one of the world's first index funds in the 1970s, and he still heads the investment firm he founded, Dimensional. Now with over a trillion dollars under management, he's penned a new book, Stay Calm.

16:56David Booth:You know, people ask me when I'm going to retire. I go, I can't retire. I'm still trying to deliver the message. It's just too hard. I say the same thing.

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18:09Hey, Chicagoland, the Wayfair store is in your neighborhood at Edens Plaza and Wilmette. Finally, you can feel the fabric, sit on the sectionals, and even open the refrigerators. Plus, our in-store designers will help you bring it all together with free one-on-one design support for any project on any budget. Yep, we said free. Oh, and did we mention the cafe? So what are you waiting for? Come see all that's in store. Visit the Wayfair store today at Edens Plaza in Wilmette. Wayfair, every style, every home. You're listening to Squawk Pod from CNBC. Legendary investor and index fund pioneer David Booth is out with a new book today titled Stay Calm, Learn to Embrace Uncertainty in Investing and in Life.

18:57David is founder and chairman of Dimensional Fund Advisors, which has more than a trillion dollars in assets under management. And he joins us now. And it's been a while. And it's amazing to have you on whenever you're on. And now you're in studio.

19:11David Booth:That's great. Great to have me. Always very exciting. Yeah. The uncertainty of Times Square might be something you don't want to embrace. We just had something yesterday. I think it happened like it's crazy around here. But I think maybe one of my favorite things that you said here is you don't need AI. Your AI is better than all the other ones out there. My AI is the market, and the market determines. That's where the rubber meets the road. That's where the rubber meets the road. Why can't people get that through their head? I don't know. People ask me when am I going to retire. I go, I can't retire.

19:42David Booth:I'm still trying to deliver the message. It's just too hard. Me too. I say the same thing. And there's many messages that need to be delivered. I think one thing, and I'm not a math genius, but the market's done 9%. If you do an index fund and you do 9 % a year, I can tell you how quickly money doubles. Can you? Oh, yeah. Eight years. Eight years, yeah. Eight years. I can divide into 72. That's my AI. So if you, can you beat it? Can you beat that? Can you pick stocks? Do you need to? No, I mean, it's a waste of time. I mean, I think it's even more a bigger problem than that are people like my parents who thought of themselves as outsiders.

20:26David Booth:So they never invested in the market because they thought the insiders would take all the money and rip them off. So they never invested. So I think that's more the message. And at the same time, you know, the pros can't seem to be able to beat the market. But you can buy the market very easily. I mean, you know, all these market index funds and what we do, you can buy. That was your right. You were at A.G. Becker. I remember A.G. Becker. Oh, yeah, right. I vaguely remember. And you said, what is all this about? Why don't we just, why don't I just create an index fund? Yeah, right. And by the time we came along, the S &P 500 was already in full swing.

21:05David Booth:And so we said, well, let's do the smaller companies. Forget the S &P. How about the other 4 ,000 publicly traded companies outside the S &P? Yeah. Anyway. I was kidding. I called you the anti-Grantham. Is the market headed down 70 % soon or you feel okay about things? Yeah, well, I don't spend much time thinking about that sort of thing. I mean, what we're trying to do is encourage people to invest at all. There's still a lot of people that don't invest. That's kind of like got the book.

21:42David Booth:Hopefully, people read the book, they'll become more optimistic about markets. There's just so much negativity out there right now. If it bleeds, it leads. As a member of mainstream media, that's what sells, right? That's right. Always. Yeah. I mean, stay calm doesn't create a lot of excitement. But it's exciting to me. But it can make you wealthy. It can make you wealthy, yeah. How does it translate to bigger lessons you can learn? That's in the book as well. Embrace uncertainty in life, that's hard to do. Yeah, well, that's part of the book as well, is just drawing parallels between life lessons and investing.

22:25David Booth:Very similar. In both cases, it's largely about managing uncertainty. Uncertainty is what creates the opportunity. If there are no uncertainty in life, you know, you couldn't have progressed the way you did, right? You take advantage of the uncertainty. And in investing, if there are no uncertainty, then everything will be riskless and all investments will give you the riskless return. Does that mean, does that translate when it comes to investing and to basically buy when the market is down, you know, be greedy when others are fearful, to quote Warren Buffett on some of those issues? Well, I guess being invested all the time.

23:01David Booth:I mean, the most difficult period, here's the classic problem we face. I've worked on for 57 years. you'll take 2020 the pandemic hits the market's down 20 percent people will go yeah gosh we have the pandemic and now the market's down 20 percent i got to get out rather than saying i've tried to train people to say is look right the expert yeah the experts seem to think this pandemic is a two or three year kind of thing so down 20 or 30 percent seems about right so that's the job of the market is set prices so you have a positive expected outcome going forward right and that's what happened people got out the next nine months of the year the market was like 50 percent right but we knew this long ago and i always reference um jesse livermore and the market is diabolical it not everyone can get rich so it's constantly doing these head fakes trying to trying to shake you out trying to you know if you look at what's right in your face you're not going to stay in the market a lot of times and that that's when you probably the easiest thing to do when you've got a nice profit is to sell that stock that stock you probably ought to be buying even though it's up the other ones you marry your losers and you ride them to zero right yeah no that's the the people there's this opportunity cost of investing that people don't understand you know to get that over the long haul.

24:25David Booth:In fact, I looked in the last 50 years, stocks have actually done 12 % a year, unbelievably. With dividends. With dividends, yeah. That's unbelievable. That's six years, David. It doubles. Yeah, right. You're quick. I know. I prepared for you. Yeah, right. Yeah, no, so but you have to be there to get it. So, going back to the 2020 example, people that panic got out, they missed that 50 % upturned and that you don't get a mulligan or a do-over you missed it so stay invested david 40 trillion though it do we ever and i talked about something earlier and this occurred to me that what we used to be able to spend tax dollars on a lot of that's getting eaten up by what we spend on interest absolutely on the day and that i i wonder does this great american and global train ride on the S &P, is that ever?