House Minority Leader Jeffries & SpaceX Investor Mark Pincus 6/25/26

0:00There's only one Ozempic! Hello, I'm Ozempic. And I'm other GLP-1s, kind of like him. Ozempic, you redid your jingle? Ah, thanks for noticing. Catchy, right? No. Okay, then. Well, ask your doctor about which FDA-approved uses of me, the Ozempic pen, may be right for you. Call 1-833-OZEMPIC or visit Ozempic.com to view the medication guide and learn more about Ozempic semaglutide injection. Two milligrams. Only Novo Nordisk makes FDA-approved Ozempic. There's only one Ozempic! I told you it was catchy. This episode is brought to you by Schwab Market Update, an original podcast from Charles Schwab.

0:35Join host Keith Lansford for this information-packed daily market preview delivered in 10 minutes or less, including projected stock updates, monetary policy decisions, and key results and statistics that may impact your trading. Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com slash marketupdatepodcast or find Schwab Market Update wherever you get your podcasts. Bring in show music, please. Hi, I'm CNBC producer Katie Kramer. Today on Squawk Pod. Who's in the middle, really? A question we can't get away from today. Talking about the politics of tech policy with Mark Pincus, the Zynga founder and entrepreneur, is out with a new book on the speed of life.

1:20These unicorns, what I call internet treasures, have not been invented yet. And a Democratic primary that shook up a few incumbents in New York City in favor of candidates more and proudly on the left. The Democrats' leader in the House, Brooklyn's Hakeem Jeffries. The Democratic Party at its best, the country at its best, believes in a strong floor and no ceiling. In other words, you work hard, you play by the rules in this country. You should be able to live an affordable life, a comfortable life, at minimum a middle class life. Plus, memory chip stocks surge. Does the AI build-out get to a point where it's built out?

2:00Are we going to keep going until we create God? Does it make a market? So you're saying this time is different. Yes. I am. It's Thursday, June 25th. Squawk Pod begins right now. Stand, Andrew, by. Three, two, one. Up in, Andrew. Two. Good morning. and welcome to Squawk Box right here on CNBC. We're live at the NASDAQ market site in Times Square. I'm Andrew Ross Sorkin, back in the chair with Joe Kernan. Becky's off today, so it's just the boys. Nice to see you, sir. Good to see you. After an eventful week and a half of sorts. Well, I don't have any... You would need to go on a... Dissect every day for you, because you're on, you know, Piers Morgan, you're at conferences, you've just got a lot going on.

2:52I've been working, as they say. There was a vacation in there, too. There was a little vacation in between. Was there a week? In the middle. Was there a week? It was a week in the middle. Have you been working for me and for Squawk? I work for this network every single day. So it was a network, okay. Every single moment. You've got a lot of different domains involved, right? As a Renaissance man. It's all in the name of Joe Kearnham. You're like, nope, you're like an octopus. And then there's the energy story, which may, I'm not sure, has actually impacted this piece of it just yet. You'd think it would.

3:30This is what's happening in the markets is memory. It really is. But this is good, too. A WTI falling back below its level from before the Iran war. It happened fast, didn't it? We spoke with Treasury Secretary Scott Besson about falling energy prices in the broader economy just yesterday on Squawk Box. We went into this on very strong energy footing, on very strong CapEx cycle from both the AI and the tax bill. The U.S. economy has really performed, and we're going to get to the other side of this conflict. As you were just showing, energy prices are coming down, inflation is going to drop, and the economy, I think, is going to be accelerating on a non-inflationary basis for the rest of the year and for the rest of the president's term.

4:18So that's the backdrop. It's interesting to watch sort of the debasement trades, the dollar trades. And I think I saw gold. I don't know if we showed it, but that has not performed well. Bitcoin has not performed well. The dollar. Bitcoin back up about what, it was 61 ,000 bucks right now? I think we're looking back down. Well, no, but yesterday we were under 60. We were like 50, 59. Got to 59, went all the way back to about 68 or so. Back to 60 or 59, up a little bit this morning. But Kevin Warsh, oil is not going to be the headwind that people were worried about. It's happened faster than people thought.

4:59I think we'll see if gas prices come down at the pump. They're about 385 or something, I think. and you saw Trump yesterday, President Trump, worrying about or at least raising the idea of gouging. Well, I was going to ask you about that. I don't. What is your sense about that? I understand how he operates. No, but given. No, I don't. I don't think that. And it's given the criticism and conversations that we've had over the years. Like Elizabeth Warren and Biden were out there screaming about gouging. And no, I understand it. these conversations in the morning where you would say you would go I don't I don't agree with it I don't agree well I mean we don't need to go back on you know obviously there's a lot of things on the populist side when President Trump thought so I like this housing bill I'm not even that disappointed in how it's bipartisan but it's there's so many things in there that I think are are populist and we've talked about that the gouging thing when he talks about the oil companies there's a difference between who's selling the gasoline and who's producing and exploring for the oil.

6:04There's overlap, obviously, but there's refiners, there's crack spreads, there's reasons that prices don't come down immediately, some of which may include some feet dragging, I think, like the prime rate. When that goes up, it goes up fast. When it comes down, the banks are in molasses. How much of it is feet dragging versus concern that it's going to go back up? I don't think that's what it is. You can check whether it's going back up by looking at the futures. That's what we're looking at. So, you know, until it, Rick Santelli, while you were out, has been on fire talking about how he was saying it's the markets that dictate and people that didn't think that oil knew what was happening and it was ignoring the fundamentals, that the only thing you ever look at, where the rubber meets the road, is in the markets.

6:53and oil all along was telling me that this was nearing an end. Because the story was that he was going to walk. Who was going to walk? That the administration was going to balk on Iran and going to try to make it. Well, I don't even know if that. I've actually, I spoke to the president off the record, and he says, what do you think? And the more I thought about it, I think it's kind of like, to a degree, cutting your losses. I think he went in for what he thought was a good reason, and a lot of people agreed with the reason. I would have liked to have seen everything happen. I would like to see a new regime and free Iranian people in a beautiful Middle East.

7:37I'd like to see all that stuff. I'd like to see no nuclear weapons. I'd like to see a lot of stuff. Not all that's going to happen. But at this point, a pragmatic end, I think, makes a lot of sense. not another forever i mean you're talking about four months not three or four years talking about no boots on the ground no it's already gonna we need a supplemental we'll talk to jim jordan about that for 87 billion dollars or whatever it is so we already got to pay that i think at this point probably the best move their naval the navy's gone uh over there they none of the centrifuges work anymore we might get inspectors and we got 60 days to try and get a good deal.

8:14But I said, you know what? Instead of being a neocon, I'm with where you are taking this at this point. And I think oil validates that. But you know, this is all the most important thing today is that Micron was supposed to, no way it's up so much. No way it was supposed to be able to do, but it wasn't going to be able to do it. But while you're out, no way everybody said it's going to be a great number, but not enough to satisfy the street. Well, let's talk about So good. Two prominent firms, and one of them is Micron, indicating there could be much more to come from the AI buildout. Christina Parts and Evolos is watching Micron and Qualcomm, which are surging this morning in a huge way, in large part what you're seeing in the Nasdaq right now.

8:58Tell us about what's happened here. Yeah, watching it. I know it was at the investor day yesterday for Qualcomm. But memory has always been just been boom and then bust. But Micron is essentially telling everyone that's completely over. and the stock is up 16 % because Wall Street is buying it this time. The reason is 16 long-term customer agreements now signed, 14 of them which are locking in roughly$100 billion in minimum guaranteed revenue through 2030. So that's, you know, the next five years. Supply also just got tighter. Management just pushed the shortage timeline past 2027, blaming fabs, workers, energy.

9:34Samsung, you talked about SK Hynix, are already catching a bid in Korea off of this, It's surging and moving South Korean markets higher. And now over to Qualcomm, where shares are also up about 12 % after its investor day here in New York yesterday. A new target of$40 billion in non-handset revenue. So that's non-smartphone revenue by 2029. Nearly double its prior forecast with roughly$15 billion of that from data center alone. A completely new category. I asked CEO Cristiano Amon just how he locks down supply to deliver on those numbers, given everything we just heard from Micron. Listen in.

10:11I have secured the capacity from the manufacturer as well as memory. I also have memory for what we do in the accelerator. So we're excited about that. And I think, you know, we're very confident in the forecast we're provided. Does that mean that you're signing long-term agreements with memory makers? We always do. Three years, five years? We always do that. So he's securing capacity at TSMC and signing these long-term agreements that we heard about from Micron. Qualcomm also named Meta as its first customer for its new data center CPU and said it signed two hyperscaler deals for custom chips, one in the United States, one Chinese.

10:46I pushed back, is it ByteDance, Amazon? You know, he didn't say anything, but those are usually, those are the two presumed names. The bottom line is that you have two chip companies, two bets on the same AI build out. Micron is betting it could break its own boom and bust cycle. Qualcomm is betting it could break its dependence on the smartphone, guys. We're going to see what's going to happen here. I have one question I've been thinking about, especially with the Micron and the Qualcomm's the world, Micron even more so. Do you say to yourself, if you're a shareholder in Micron, that this is like the most amazing management team and they're killing it?

11:20Or do you say to yourself that they got super lucky to even be in this position? The wind is at their back. They didn't expand production enough. It's a remarkable way. And therefore, and not only was the wind at their back now, given what's happened, now they didn't expand production. So that's actually on the downside. Where are their margins going now, Christina? Because it was like ridiculous what they were this quarter. And they forecast, what, 90 percent for next quarter or something? 87? Which is absolutely insane for any type of AI company. To both of your points, they are very conservative on their build out.

11:55They are increasing their CapEx to at least over$40 billion next year. $20 billion of that is going to go to construction and clean rooms, which takes a long time to build. But to your point, Andrew, yes, they are gaining an advantage because of the current market dynamics. The demand is so high for all of these AI-type memory chips, and they weren't prepared for the supply. You can almost apply that same type of scenario for Intel. Intel said that, you know, two quarters ago that their CPUs were just flying out the door. They weren't expecting that and they couldn't meet up with demand. So that was a symptom of the actual market economies as opposed to, you know, a company that is pushing their CPUs forward.

12:37So I think in this sense, Micron is benefiting. They're saying it's no longer a commoditized product because they are signing these long-term agreements to give them revenue visibility. and they can determine the pricing right now, which is great for them to keep those margins up, to your point, Joe. But overall, yes, they are taking advantage of the current market conditions. It's never different this time, but maybe this time it's different because boom and bust is all we ever talked about with memory and with Micron. And, General, my question, does the AI build-out get to a point where it's built out?

13:13or are we going to keep going until we create God? Well, this is the larger question about AI infrastructure at all, which is, is there an end state? That's what I mean. And if there is no end state and you just have to keep plowing capital in, then the math doesn't math. It just can't. I would hope that you would have to keep doing that for companies like Micron, that the build-out never ends. Sure, but how could that ever be? Because the payoff is so good that you have to have the capital. You're just constantly. Sooner or later, we've got to have the payoff. Guys, there are restrictions, though.

13:49And that's the fact that the labor force is just not up to par. You have so many permits. You saw that with the delays with Micron's clay plant in New York. It's been delayed so many times. And I think maybe the market is not accounting for how long this is actually going to take. And then that can apply to Elon Musk's tariff fab, right? He's planning on building all of these new chips. He's never really been in that chip industry before in an extremely short amount of time. The executives I spoke to, they believe in his capabilities. They just don't believe that he can turn these chips around in such a short amount of time.

14:20So I think maybe the market is not taking into account how long these actual buildouts take and the hurdles, especially here in the United States. I think we've got to just expand our mind to all kinds of different things. I mean, now it's not just this planet anymore. now. We've got to take into account the whole freaking universe that are going to have data centers. You know, we're going to have satellites with data centers inside the satellite. So you're saying this time is different? Yes. I am. I just, we had LaFonta on the other day. You were in for that. People are thinking about what the world's going to look like five and ten years from now.

14:59And maybe nobody knows, but some people have a better idea than others. I have no idea. I didn't predict any of this. He bought GE Vernova three years ago, and we're finally doing segments on it now after it's tripled because of all the power. Buying land for data centers. Would you know where to buy, Andrew, based on permits, based on proximity to the workforce you want? You'd have to go scour land opportunities where data centers are going to be in, where the electricity is going to be able to be going. That's been going on the last two and a half, three years. That's what these companies have been doing.

15:31Well, I'm just coming up to speed on it. Just like I am that we actually are going to have things happening off this planet. Maybe even mining. Is that possible? I think all of that stuff is possible, but that is like 10, 20 years from now, 30 years from now. That's not a tomorrow story. Well, we're going to enjoy watching that together on this show. I hope so. Really? For your sake. For your sake. Hey! The teas will be next. Still to come on Squawk Pod, Zynga founder, venture investor and author Mark Pincus. What he's learned from past innovation revolutions and the changes still to come in this one.

16:17We thought that Amazon and e-commerce was going to wipe out all retail and it turns out it didn't. And in each era, it's non-zero sum. We've seen more jobs, more growth. We keep having record low unemployment. it. Plus, the evolving politics of America and of AI right after this.

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17:43This episode is brought to you by Schwab Market Update, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Join host Keith Lansford for this information-packed daily market preview delivered in 10 minutes or less, including projected stock updates, monetary policy decisions, and key results and statistics that may impact your trading. Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com slash market update podcast or find Schwab Market Update wherever you get your podcasts.

18:15This is Squawk Pod. Stand Joe by. Three, two, wipe up some, his mic, cue. You're watching Squawk Box on CNBC. I'm Joe Kernan along with Andrew Ross Sorkin. Here we are. How's it feel? Feels good. Good to be back. It feels good. I'm on Europe time. So this is like super late in the day. This is lunch. So you feel awake then. I'm awake. Yeah. I'm very awake. Did you check your thing? My aura ring. You really don't want to know about what was going on with the aura ring on this trip. Oh, no. My aura today is... Who'd you take it out on? I'm on an 82. Without me there, who'd you take it out on? An 82.

18:5482. But I had a couple of rough days. 70s? 60s and I had a sleep day that was in the 30s. I've never had that before. I don't even want to know. Turning ideas into products that people love. That is the concept behind Life at the Speed of Play, a new book by a billionaire investor and Zynga founder Mark Pincus. Mark joins us now to talk about his book and so much more. By the way, he's got investments in so many different companies right now. It's unbelievable how you score. My only hardware investment ever. And you have my luck. That one worked. And it worked. And apparently you have an okay reading this morning?

19:30I had to work my ass off to get to a 79. What does that mean? You had to go to sleep early. I went to bed at 9 30 and you're drinking Pellegrino water. That's what I need a coffee. We got to get you a coffee. Um, but let's talk about this before we get to all these investments that you've made, which are paying off in crazy ways, given what's happening with AI right now. Uh, this is called life at the speed of play. And this is sort of a mantra for you about how you've lived your life. And we're all trying to figure out how to live our life. We're looking at the aura rings and everything else, but also how to create great businesses.

20:04What's the concept? Well, the concept is that so many of people watching this right now have an idea. They have a winning instinct and they're probably never going to act on it. And then those Those who do will probably fail. And what I realized over my career is that we can fundamentally change our odds of success. And this book, I hope for people, is like a cheat code. Okay, so give us a little bit of the cheat of the cheat code. Okay. The premise, and I created a whole course at Stanford on this, is that we have winning instincts. Like I started one of the first social networks before Meta, before Facebook, and I still managed to fail.

20:47I had clearly a winning instinct, but we put a losing idea on top of that and we don't keep testing and looking. And so the premise is you have a winning instinct and a losing idea. The path, the frameworks in this book are that you should test more ideas in a week than an industry test in a year and follow my framework I call proven, better, new. Start with what already works and then find your innovation zone on top of that. Too many people fail for the wrong reasons. So you think that you actually, but then you're getting into this idea of copying. Some people say you shouldn't be copying folks, but you sort of have a concept which is like start with a good copy.

21:30Yeah, it's Peter Till would call it a moral arbitrage. And we see Zuckerberg doing it every day. He just announced, I think, that he's going to do a prediction markets, prediction markets. Right. And so you've got to get over that because the innovation is in the eyes of our users, not our peers. And so the innovation is how can you take something that people already love in the world and make it better? Okay, but here's a question. You've made investments in companies like SpaceX and OpenAI and Anthropic. And I could argue to you none of those were really a copy of anything. I mean, they were truly novel.

22:11And does the most novel stuff, is that to really sort of shoot the moon? And maybe the argument is you don't have to shoot the moon to be successful. But to shoot the moon, can it start with a copy? It's a great question. There's lots of paths to create huge companies. And I start the book saying that we're on the brink of a future life of the speed of play where we're all going to live like Elon, where we can tweet something into existence. But if you look at Elon's path or if you look at open AI, it was billions and billions and billions of dollars of capital and years and years and years to then have an overnight success.

22:55And that is an amazing path. That's not available to most people. But this is. We're in an era where anybody can take an idea and turn it into something real over a weekend. And you can do that with AI. Go back for a second. How did you get in early on SpaceX and Anthropik and OpenAI, for example? I thought these were big ideas. You didn't think it was crazy? I created a fund with Reid Hoffman called Reinvent. I remember. And we said, I think we did an interview during the pandemic about it. Yeah, we did. We did. And and by the way, the fund is now done well. It invested in SpaceX. And our premise was that in the future, there's going to be venture like upside from big companies that we can go into companies that already have achieved scale, product market fit and see 10x in the case of SpaceX, you know, 100x returns at companies that.

24:00And that at the time was a novel idea because growth capital was about a 3x return. And so we were looking for these large, mature companies, seemingly mature, like Joby, like SpaceX, that their biggest upside was in the future. Do you think that if these companies succeed on the AI front, that it is a mass sort of benefit economic boon for the country and the world? Or do you see it as a winner and loser scenario? I just got back from Europe and I was in Cannes where the whole debate was very much in the sort of context of these commencement addresses and the booing that was taking place and sort of this social anxiety about what it's going to do to the country and to the world.

24:55Yeah, well, I'm an AI maximalist. Today's a good day to be an AI maximalist. If I come in yesterday, you would have looked at me like I was crazy. And now with Micron, it's a good day. Right. Look, having like you guys, I lived through these eras from mobile phone to Internet to the original mobile phone to to the smartphone. And what I've seen is in each era, there's fear. We thought that Amazon and e-commerce was going to wipe out all retail. And it turns out it didn't. And in each era, it's non zero sum. We've seen more jobs, more growth. We keep having record low unemployment. And so I believe, will there be some dislocation?

25:43Yes. Have we seen it so far? No. So there's more job openings in computer science now than a year ago. Why do you think, we've had, I think, pretty great AI now for about a year, year and a half, maybe. I don't know how long you think it's really been at the level. You created Zynga, mobile games on the phone, unbelievable. There has not been a new app or a new game or a new something really that's been developed on the back of AI that has changed the course of the way the consumer works. I'm sort of surprised. I agree. I kept thinking to myself something was going to show up on the doorstep because someone's going to create something that's so clever and so out of the box and so wild.

26:28And yes, people are probably programming a lot of the games now. I don't know how much of you think of them are hard-coded or actually being done by Claude, for example. But no one's come up with the next thing. I agree. Why? And that's also part of what my book is about, which is, you know, if you look at the front of your iPhone, we could each show what's on the homepage of our iPhone. Mine is half empty. Right. And then the half that's full is full of generic apps, right, of podcasts, weather, calendar. And what it tells me is that these unicorns, what I call Internet treasures, have not been invented yet.

27:10I mean, the idea of intelligence on tap, I mean, the rethinking what would the weather app be or calendar or even Instagram in a world where you have unlimited tokens, unlimited AI, it's not been invented yet. So that's why I'm so optimistic. You do something, by the way, personally that I found fascinating between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur every year. you spend 10 days writing notes to yourself about your life for the past year. Yeah. What happens in that process? Is that a little bit, you remember years ago, Bill Gates would say that he would like go away for two weeks a year to like think about the world.