Cheating in Chess with Ben Mezrich, Taxing AI with Andrew Yang 6/4/26

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Bring in show music, please.

**Cameron Costa** (0:04)
This is Squawk Pod and I'm CNBC producer Cameron Costa. On today's episode, we're talking AI job displacement and AI taxes with former presidential candidate Andrew Yang.

**Andrew Yang** (0:17)
I run a company, Noble Mobile. The easiest people to fire are the people you haven't hired yet. So are we replacing junior analysts, junior engineers with AI? 100 percent. And if we are doing that, then I guarantee organizations around the country are doing the exact same thing.

**Cameron Costa** (0:30)
Then, author Ben Mezrich is out with a new book, The Biggest Scandal in Chess and the Internet Theory on how the 19-year-old chess prodigy defeated world champion Magnus Carlsen. A hint, it is definitely not safe for work.

**Ben Mezrich** (0:47)
It's this crazy thing that's not supposed to happen, and the way he might have cheated turned into this viral sensation. Are we allowed to say it?

**Becky Quick** (0:54)
Yeah, you can say it.

**Cameron Costa** (0:56)
And that's not the only surprising story today.

**Joe Kernen** (0:59)
You don't say this every day. Flesh-eating screw worm. A flesh-eating screw worm.

**Cameron Costa** (1:05)
Plus, the House vote on a war powers resolution to halt US military action in Iran. And Jamie Dimon is reportedly pitching the SpaceX IPO.
It is Thursday, June 4, 2026, and Squawk Pod begins right now.

**Ben Mezrich** (1:23)
Stand Becky by in 3, 2, 1, cue, please.

**Becky Quick** (1:28)
All right. 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 Kernen and Andrew Ross Sorkin. We are back in New York after being in DC this week. Glad to be here.

**Joe Kernen** (1:42)
Everybody well-rested.

**Becky Quick** (1:45)
Oh, yeah. We're here. We're here for all of this.
Look, all good things have to come to an end, and that was the case yesterday, at least for the Bulls on Wall Street. You had both the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ ending nine-day winning streaks. They had their worst day since May 15th, I believe. The S&P 500, or the Dow was down as well, and it had its worst performance since all the way back to March. The NASDAQ under pressure because of the results from Broadcom and the disappointment that's kind of spread through the chip industry this morning. We'll talk more about that in a little bit, but it looks like the NASDAQ right now is off by just over 300 points, and Bitcoin continues to fall. You might want to call this a crypto winter at this point. It's off another 3.8 percent. Bitcoin's sitting just above $63,000.

**Joe Kernen** (2:28)
Journal says-

**Andrew Ross Sorkin** (2:29)
How much of that is really-

**Joe Kernen** (2:30)
Bitter cold. Crypto winter turns bitter cold.

**Andrew Ross Sorkin** (2:34)
And the question, though, is how much of that is a function of SpaceX, IPO, is it the tech pullback, or is there an actual sentiment change about Bitcoin?

**Joe Kernen** (2:45)
Michael Saylor didn't help, right?

**Andrew Ross Sorkin** (2:47)
I mean, you have the Michael Saylor piece. By the way, even just talking to someone like Mark Cuban, who came out publicly and said that they dumped all their shares.

**Joe Kernen** (2:58)
What I call it, last week, when I said it last week, you looked at me like I was crazy. What did I say? Dog with fleas? What was that? Wednesday or Thursday?

**Andrew Ross Sorkin** (3:07)
I looked at you like you're crazy before you've been telling me it's like-

**Joe Kernen** (3:11)
Well, I saw it happening. Well, I mean, yeah, as you were negative the entire way from 5,000, it went to 125,000. So it's pretty darn great.

**Andrew Ross Sorkin** (3:19)
Right.

**Joe Kernen** (3:20)
It's still at 60 I mean, even at- 63
You know who could be right? Katie Stocks is at 59 and we went to 80 in the meantime. Maybe she'll be right about that. She could be right about the S&P, the way things are acting right now at 7,100. Other people could be. Actually, she was below that.

**Becky Quick** (3:38)
It's 75, 50 I know. It was down for the first time after being up for nine sessions in a row.

**Joe Kernen** (3:44)
Well, we talked about things like Micron. Micron is down about $60 today. Micron didn't even say anything.

**Becky Quick** (3:51)
No, and if Broadcom did.

**Joe Kernen** (3:52)
Well, I know. Broadcom didn't really say anything that bad. It was the outlook.

**Becky Quick** (3:55)
No, the problem is those stocks are trading at pretty high earnings relative to somebody like an NVIDIA, which is in the low 20s still. Broadcom was above 30