still waiting on the biggie, though. treasury secretary. we take you live to west palm beach. reports say doj and anti-trust officials will ask a good to force alphabet to sell its chrome browser. it's tuesday, november 19th, 2024. "squawk box" begins right now. ♪ good morning. welcome to "squawk box" 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. as joe mentioned, the u.s. equity futures are under pressure at this hour. you will see the dow futures down by 226 points. s&p futures down 18. nasdaq off 42.

that was a significant drop that we witnessed earlier this morning. you should put it in context. you are only talking about a decline of less than .6% for the dow. less than that for the other major averages. we will talk about the situation in ukraine developing in a moment. it does come after a decline for the dow yesterday of 55 points. it was a mixed day for the market. s&p was up and nasdaq up .6%. treasury yields this morning have been higher, trending higher for weeks in a row, but lower this morning. the ten-year sitting at 4.36. the two-year at 4.23. you can ascribe that to a flight of safety with the geopolitical concerns. let's talk about the geopolitical issue with the breaking news. the bloomberg report citing ukrainian military officials saying the armed forces carried out the first strike in the

border using u.s. supplied long-range missiles. this as vladimir putin signed a doctrine lowering the threat of nuclear weapons. any conventional attack on russia supported by a nuclear power considered it a joint attack on his country. we will continue to monitor the situation and bring you them as we get those updates as we sort through what exactly just happened. >> on the border. it was within russia. >> 75 miles inside russia. >> yeah. based on what he said, that would theoretically qualify. >> the change they made in the doctrine. it is saber-rattling. this is the countdown for the final weeks of fighting if president trump does what he said he is going to do and

resolve this. >> and suddenly europe is on board. it would be nice -- i don't know what the real liesman talks about it. other than what is the terminal settlement? complete utter defeat of ukraine? >> they need to make sure they have the best negotiating position they can have before this can happen so they can say here's where the line begins and we need to necessity gosh esh ? >> is a win possible? >> no. >> we knew we were headed this way. i thought it has something to do with north korea. >> it did. the biden administration is allowing this because russia allowed north korea to send fighters in. if you are a non-nuclear country attacking, they cannot use nuclear weapons on this.

now the doctrine says if you are a non-nuclear country supported by a nuclear country, the united states, that changes the rules of engagement. >> the question is do they hold you to account and the question is how do they hold you to account? >> i guess you are right. 200 points. >> it is not even .6%. 200 points is not what it used to be on the dow. we did notice an immediate drop in the futures and when we see things like that, we try to explain why. >> where did bitcoin go, by the way? >> 90 plus. >> that is risk on/risk off. >> treasury yield is down. that is people going into the safety trade. let's get back to what's happening in this country. president-elect trump's transition team and more picks for the incoming administration. megan cassella joins us now with more. good morning. >> reporter: good morning to

you, joe. from west palm beach, we did get more news with trump tapping sean duffy, current fox business news host, to be his transportation secretary. that puts him in charge of the $100 billion budget and the infrastructure money passed in the biden administration that some republicans talked about rescinding to pay for the agenda next year. one thing to watch in the agency if he is confirmed, and that does put us well past through halfway filling out the cabinet. the biggest position unfilled is the treasury secretary. all eyes down here on that position and that fight which is really spilled into public view in recent days. an expanded pool of candidates on the table all familiar names to you and all of us at this point. the key to watch with the secretary picks and one thing i'm told has made this decision a little harder is the president-elect is weighing

consideration. he wants to tap someone fully committed to his economic agenda, especially on the tariffs front, but he also wants to choose someone who wall street and the markets will like. he doesn't want to disrupt the market rally and positivity he has seen since the election. that is something to keep in mind when we see scott bessent considered a favorite with the op-ed celebrating tariffs trying to walk back previous comments he made about implementing them in a gradual way or measured with them. trying to be a forceful supporter there. it is something that can come up with kevin warsh, the past decade or so has written a measured trade stance and being a free trader. in 2018, he wrote about economic isolationism and weakening the dollar. something that president trump showed he might be favorable to saying those would harm the economy and ill advised.

on the other end of the spectrum, he can't lean too hard into someone hawkish on trade like robert lighthizer, who is out of the running for treasury secretary because of the trade stance that would go over with wall street. joe, something to keep in mind, something the president-elect is keeping in mind as he makes that decision this week. joe. >> inn concongruous. it may or may not be on board. lighthizer is concerned with a rising stock market. then you have to ask youshz rsea rising stock market. do you want tariffs across the board? it begs the question. >> reporter: you have to find someone. just probably not in that

treasury position. remember how things went with treasury secretary steve mnuchin in the first term. in hindsight trump and lighthizer with the gold wing of the administration may have slow walked aspects of the trade agenda. trying to be more balanced. i would say, joe, i wouldn't be surprised if new names continue to emerge in the treasury secretary fight. everyone i talked to said this is up to the president-elect alone. it means there is a lack of clarity and they are calling around and we just don't know who it's going to be yet. >> it is also the short-term long-term implications. if you talk to the investors on wall street, they would love to see kevin warsh manage the reaction of the treasury markets who are growing borrowing. >> i don't know taking the punch bowl away qualifies being friendly to the market.

>> short-term versus long-term. the short-term euphoria is not overwhelmed by long-term needs. that's a tricky task. >> reporter: maybe there is a way to have a more measured trade stance. bessent talked about it being a tool. it looked like a way he was trying to say, yes, let's use tariffs and let's also not do universal base lane tariffs to stay in place forever. there may be gray area to navigate. >> that is what howard lutnick said on set with us. ing tool. >> exactly. lutnick may be out to pasture. maybe it's not his trade stance that disqualifies him.

>> negotiate ing tools for taris in countries that were negotiating that. megan, thank you. let's get to lowe's. remember, home depot reacted positively and got close to an all-time high. lowe's is up this morning. up nicely. up 1%. $3. earnings of $2.89 a share. 7 cents above estimate on revenue of $21.7 billion. also above expectations. same-store sales did decline 1.1%. analysts were expecting a 2.7% decline. for the full year, lowe's is raising the low end of its guidance for earnings and raising its revenue guidance. now the company is at $11.80 to $11.90. the street is at $11.$11.82. when we come back, the

report that ukraine is using u.s. made long-range missiles inside russia. a look at what is moving at this point which is everything. we will have an interview with eric schmidt, former google ceo and chairman. eric schmidt will be joining us later this morning. "squawk box" will be right back. growing your business is easy once you know the moves. with godaddy websites plus marketing, you can quickly create a website, and ai will customize it for you. get your business out there and get more customers in here. no sweat... for you anyway. create a beautiful website in minutes with godaddy.

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welcome back, everybody. stock futures, if you are just waking up, are falling this morning. it looks like the dow futures are off 220 points. s&p futures and nasdaq down as well. this comes after a report said that ukraine launch pd ed an at inside russian territory with u.s. made missiles. we bring in sylvia jablonski. sylvia, this is not what you were planning to talk about this morning, but welcome to live television. how concerned are you about the report out of ukraine? we're looking at a reaction this morning of the market's down. it was a big drop, but still a decline of .6% for the dow and less on the percentage basis for the other major averages. what are you thinking?

>> good morning, becky. it's never good to wake up to this news. i think this is always the caveat on what could hamper a market rally going into year end or going forward. we have essentially two wars going on, two major wars we're well aware of and monitoring and escalations tend to lead to market pull backs. what i would say is what i see is a muted reaction to this as compared to what we've seen with some of the attacks in israel for example with nasdaq off 300 or 400 or 500 points so far. at this point, the market is muted. how it escalates, we have a switch of presidents coming into office and where this all goes is up in the air right now. >> having said -- having said that, you have the new administration coming in and the market which has been pretty enthusiastic for the administration and still questions on the details of how this will work. there were a lot of promises

made during the election cycle and there's been a lot of commentary and some written pieces recently just digging into the idea these are not all promises that are going to be able to be delivered if you are looking at the map. you made promises to the wealthy class and made promises to average americans. how does this play out? i ess where do you think in terms of the market enthusiasm and what can be delivered? >> yeah, sure. so, i think where we've come in the markets very much due to the back drop. we have strong jobs and wages steady and increasing. a consumer has been spending and a lot of stability in macroeconomics with gdp 2% to 3%. rates coming down and support of fed put. regardless of the election, the markets should do well and rally to year end. projections for next year on high single digits and low double digits. everything is rosy and soft

landing roaring 2020s. what the market doesn't like is uncertainty. as you said, we don't know what policies get passed. we don't know about tariffs or immigration. those two things can affect supply and can affect -- which can affect inflation. again, deregulation and tax cuts can lead to the opposite happening. it could be a net zero. it remains to be seen what actually happens here. overall, deregulation tends to be good for markets. the path of the fed matters. as long as inflation doesn't creep back up and the fed steadily reduces tes, i think we will rally to year end minus this pull back. potentially a strong year next year as well. >> i think the biggest question is do earnings keep up with some of this enthusiasm? we have lots of, as you mentioned, enthusiasm that is tied to deregulation and lower tax rates and that's clearly a

plus for business forces being unleashed, but you also have markets risen pretty substantially. everything looks great, but there's always a price. where do you think about where stocks stand in valuation terms at this point? >> valuations are high, but earnings have thus far justified those valuations. so, i think what happens is if you actually get the tax cuts and get the deregulation and rates come down, that is a tailwind for corporate earnings going forward. i think that keeps up with the rally. in terms of when it exhausts, there will be an end in sight, but not in the near term here. the other thing investors can do is broaden out their exposure. the overvaluation comes from the top 33% of the s&p 500 which is really the mag seven. if you broaden out to the 493 names and the ex-mag names

hidden in there, the palantirs, a lot of places to put your money that aren't overvalued at this point. >> sylvia, thanks a lot. >> thank you. coming up when we return, news out from smart ring maker oura, tom hale will join us. and later this hour, former google ceo ec rischmidt will be on set with us to talk about so much with so much news uring through the system. we'll be right back. this holiday season. give the gift of sport at dick's.

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welcome back to "squawk

box." dexcom and oura are forming a partnership alongside the dexcom $75 million investment in oura. the company valued at $5 billion. the company has a number of prominent investor names and we talked about oura because so many people wear it, including myself. not prominent users. >> i really thought you meant yours truly. >> no. everybody from michael dell. tom hale will join us. michael dell and lance armstrong were investors. now the company is worth $5 billion. >> that's why lance armstrong was so good. >> that was after his cycling career. tom hale. it's nice to see you, sir.

>> andrew, super excited to talk about the partnership with oura and dexcom. like any good partnership, it's a bit of product integration and collaboration and little bit of investment. this personal story. it started, you know, when we met in person and kevin, the ceo of dexcom was wearing a oura and i was wearing a dexcom and we said there is a huge opportunity here. >> i hope our audience knows what the oura ring is. this is one of them. it tracks your sleep and activity throughout the day. for those folks who have an apple watch, it's a little bit different. similar in concept, tom. i don't know if you would be offended by that. trying to figure out how to explain it to those. the idea of the continuous glucose monitor is a very big deal in healthcare in the last

couple years now. now the idea is that folks would wear a ring and dexcom monitor at the same time. would you wear the glucose monitor for folks just who have diabetes our now i'm seeing people wearing these for health to understand their own glucose needs for diet and everything else. >> glucose is important. it's the energy source of the body. it's affected by sleep activity and stress. your daily biology changes as you eat food. understanding glucose is key. by the way, most people don't understand it. what's happened with glucose monitors is they are more available and accessible than ever before. they are available over-the-counter in the u.s. anyone can go to the pharmacy or amazon or the brand name of glow glucose from dexcom.

they can wear it for 15 days or 30 days and see how it affects their biology. we want to see how it affects their holistic health had. that is where the oura ring comes in. i have one on now. it changes how i eat and think about foods which i thought were healthy and turned out to be sugar bombs for me. >> the question is how is it integrated with the ring? >> so, the software application from oura, the oura app, takes the information from the ring and ingest the data from the glucose sensor and provides you new insight. one thing that people will learn, an hour before they wake up, the blood sugar spikes along with the cortisol in the body. it wakes you up and brings you right into the consciousness. other things people learn, if i eat late, the sugar that i eat, sometimes can maybe delay the

onset of sleep or make my sleep lower quality. these insights are going to be different for everybody because everybody's everybody's different. if you think about sleep, it is the one thing people do once a day, but people eat three times a day. it can have a big impact on your life. >> tom, is it your expectation people will buy a dexcom and wear it for 30 days and stop and then just have those insights they know from that period of time or wear it continuously all the time the same way people would wear a ring all the time to know and track everything that's going on all the time? obviously, there are people who don't want all of the data. that's a separate matter. >> there are advantages to gaining the insight and understanding what works for you. for example, if i eat rice, it spikes my blood sugar. now i learned it, i changed my behavior.

you want to see change over time. we see people wearing the ring to give them the sense of their biology over time and how it's changing and they apply glucose monitors when they made changes. if you started working out or tried to be focused on sleep or improve health. you want to see how that is interacting. providing that experience is going to be powerful for people. >> tom, there's been speculation for a long time. i mentioned the apple watch that apple is working on the effort and others, i should say, to do the glucose monitoring without pricking you and having to wear a separate device, right? this is the holy grail of, i think, the business you're in. the ring has a series of light sensors on it and maybe there's some way to actually figure out glucose without actually having to stick a needle in you. by the way, i've done this before. the needle doesn't feel like

anything. it's a nothing. if you could avoid that, there was something non invasive at all, that would be a miracle. how far are you from that and irrespective of how far you are from it, how far is the industry from that? >> you know, this is a topic of lots of people's interests. i think the reality is that it is kind of like the holy grail. it mighting be out there, but one has yet to find it. i think it is possible, but it will be measured in a decade or so to be accurate enough and people to be confident to trust their lives to it. in the meantime, cgms are the best we have and they work and they here today. the learning about glucose and impact on longevity and stress and sleep and health is transformative. we have already seen it. i was in new york last week and people said i'm going to a party and we are putting continuous glucose monitors on and talk

about sugar. >> wild. wild. matt gaetz -- probably not. tom, what besides rice got you -- you know, i may not wear the ring, but i can benefit from your experience. what caused sugar bombs? >> some people are different. >> i know, but we kind of look alike. what caused it? >> i used to drink a latte in the morning. yogurt and cola and thinking i was super healthy. >> yogurt? >> no. it completely spiked by blood sugar. rice wag s the surprise. >> snicker's bar? >> finitely off the menu. sorry about that. >> not good. >> tom, it was yogurt that had

fruit in it? not plain? >> plain yogurt is better. for me, flavored yogurt was the kryptonite. the point is everyone can have a different experience and different learning because everybody's different. >> what's the price point real quick of the continuous glucose monitors that pair with the ring? >> the dexcom stella monitor in a pack of two and $99 for 30 days. it is more affordable. you could only get them with a prescription and now available over-the-counter. >> not cheap if you are doing it all the time. tom, thank you so much. appreciate it. $5 billion valuation. that's a big deal. thanks. coming up, we're going to continue to monitor a report saying that ukraine launched an attacknse iidrussia using u.s. supplied long-range missiles.

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five things to know ahead of today's opening bell. bloomberg reporting that ukrainian armed forces carrying out the first strike within russia and territory with u.s. supplied long-range missiles. russian president putin signing a revised dock trine lowering t use of the threat of nuclear weapons saying any threat on russia by any nation supported by a nuclear power would be considered a joint attack on his country. back here in the u.s., walmart set to report at the top of the hour. the stock up 14.5% since the last report, i should say, three months ago. on the economic data front, the latest housing start data at 8:30 a.m. eastern time. polled forecasters looking for a slight decline from the prior month. reports say doj anti-trust

officials plan to ask a judge to force alphabet's google to sell off it's chrome browser according to the multiple reports. leooe dge ruled that ggl ilgally monopolized the market. coming up, former google ceo eric schmidt will join us on set. we'll be right back. >> announcer: five things to know is sponsored by state street global weisz advice rs. getting there starts here. state street. invest in your future with spy, the world's most traded etf. (♪♪)

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>> welcome back to "squawk box." our next guest is a known leader in the tech industry weighing in on so many issues. regulation under trump administration and so much more, but he's got a new book out. eric schmidt here. former ceo of google. "genesis:hope and the human

spirit." you have two co-authors, but one of them is henry kissinger. it is one of the books he worked on before he passed away . >> the last book he worked on before he passed away. he figured it out. the biggest issue is the impact on our human dignity. how do we perceive ourselves? are we human or the dogs to the computer or the computers under control? >> i want to get into that with the here and now if you'll even dulg me. we talked about the report that came out last night about the potential for your former employer to be forced to push chrome outside of google and effectively to spin that business off or break it up. what do you think of that and what do you think -- do you think there is a regulatory need to do something at google? >> a lot of this has to do with

the anti-trust activities which were initiated by president trump in the first term and continued by biden. if you want to deal with them, regulate them, but do it in a fair way and open way and a ppl to everybody. >> the impact of taking chrome out of google is what? >> chrome itself doesn't make any money. what they are referring to is the use of chrome means higher revenues with shared browsers. those are business decisions. i don't gree with the government's attitude. >> do you think the anti-trust will change with trump? a report out recently that they may not go after apple. is there a sea change here? >> lina khan and the executive government will be leaving.

she pushed a punch of theories. we will see if they are proven over time. the important thing from my perspective is the anti-trust efforts don't work. if you want to regulate, regulate. do it in a precise way. do it in such a way you understand your outcomes. don't play other games. these companies, by the way, as their defender, are under enormous pressure from employees and lawsuits. this is just another regulatory pressure on them. >> the department of justice began this. >> that's correct. >> this is not something out there. there are other companies from microsoft and at&t which have gotten broken up over the years. >> microsoft was not broken up. >> it had to deal with -- it wasn't broken up. it had to deal with the separation and the terms the government placed on it. >> what happened is that set microsoft back ten years. >> bill gates blamed it. >> from my perspective, breaking

up these companies will not address the annoyance. they are integrated. i worked with the european union to slowdown the regulation. google found other ways of being successful in business. it is much more subtle. the companies are vertically integrated to deliver an experience, i'll take you an example of apple. proposal to take the app store away from apple. that is an integral experience for the user. it is a degradation. for what? you think people want to downlow tide download their app store? >> here is a question of the search business. for google, it is a search business. it does have a 90% market share for that business. if you define search as the blue link economy, the question right

now is all of a sudden we're talking about a.i. and we're talking about the ceo of perplexity on yesterday. i'll see sam altman in a couple of weeks at openai. apple is trying to build its system. everybody is trying to build something. do you define the marketplace search as the blue link economy and what you put into your search bar today as that is the size of the market or is the size of the search market a different market because people are using the other a.i. services and that becomes search or when you go to search on an amazon or search on instagram or whatever, you absolute think about that as a search product? >> usually people are talking about the search business. they are talking about the ad business, not the search. the search will go from the blue links to the question which is in the goal of google and google's competitors.

i just don't see regulating the link placement which is what regulators try to do will essentially solve the problem. these products will get turned over to give you much better coaching and ideas and much better integrated. there will be issues around who is dominate there, but remember the last year, there was a great deal of criticism for goog. google has come back. that is evidence of competition which is a key component in anti-trust. >> do you think it will change? do you think five years from now, there is a 90% market share in search or will other people emerge? >> my own view is search will change and the term search. you won't be searching, you'll be existing. we talk in the book about determined by human and computer. humans have different preferences. my own view is you have lots of interesting choices at the next layer. they are well above the blue

link economy that you talked about. >> getting back to the book and this idea of dignity. our own dignity any and us all being human and having a purpose. how concerned are you that we won't have a purpose and if you have a machine you think is smarter than you -- by the way, i think the machine is smarter than i am today. to be blunt about it. >> i don't think so. >> in many ways, it is smarter than i am. i don't think it can think the way i can. it has a lot more knowledge than i'll ever have. >> so does a library. >> what do you think about that five or ten years from now? >> speak for yourself. >> humans are not going away. there's a long pattern of business efficiencies taking the drudge, the bad jobs and dangerous jobs and allowing humans to creative and use our judgment. it will take a long time for

those to go away. the problem with the business efficiency for a.i. is replacing low-level tedious jobs. we have an issue those people will need a new place to work because human dignity involves working. >> do you think we need to make strides in neurology to ever get to that point for machines or do you think just raw size of the data that a machine assimilates? we are nowhere near understanding how you see green or feel love or the spirit of humans. we have no idea how that happens. >> we can build computers that can appear to have consciousness, but they don't really have it. the reason we know -- >> do we need to understand the brain before we get to that point? >> we will. >> personally, i don't know if we will. >> personally, we won't in our lifetime. >> there is now a question in the a.i. community that bubbled up in the last month or so about

whether the industry is hitting a quote wall in terms of how fast the scaling capabilities are of a.i. sam altman tweeted there is no wall. others said there is a wall or a slowdown of some sort. what do you think is happening? >> there's been a slope right there. a scaling wall. more hardware and more data. you get the incredible abilities which you see from the various competitors. gemini and openai and claw and others. they are really impressive. there is some evidence in the past month or two that it is harder to get to the next traunche. it is harder to find new data because the data has been searched. on the other hand, you have huge groups developing new algorithms. the pace is not slowing, but the nature of the pace may change as a result. >> the other question i was

asking and this is an enterprise question for the audience. a lot of people have taken on microsoft copilot and a bunch of stories and marc benioff used it to his benefit to say, you know what, all of the stuff not totally ready for primetime yet. employees like it to some degree, but they complain they don't feel they are getting the value out of it yet. it's more of a party trick than it is something that is helping them in the day-to-day. what do you think about that? >> there's evidence that a programmer or half the code is written by the programmer and half written by a.i. if you ask the programmer, being human, i wrote all of it and the computer helped. the computer would be he helped me, but i wrote it. i would argue that is an improvement in efficiency and productivity which is a good thing. >> will there be a quantum or a gradual advance? >> it looks so far exponential

from your perspective gradual like a slope. there are people who leave, i call this the san francisco school because they're all in san francisco at the moment where the slope will accelerate. the quantum change you are describes. where we invent a.i.s and not human. there is a belief that will occur within the next three-to-five years. >> you can't look at ourselves. we need to create something to look at us? >> a lot of these things are math. computers will get really good with math with the tools. imagine 1,000 human scientists, 100 a.i. scientists. that's of a belief. >> one final thing for you and i know we have to go. data leakage. that is another issue that enterprises are worried about right now. there are a number of stories with copilot right now. everybody thinks they siloed

data, but on work systems, some couldn't get to salaries. if you now have an openai or copilot or gemini where you type in what you want to see, it is unearthing and finding things that employees are not supposed to see or scheduled for a certain group of people. how hard is it going to be long term for businesses to actually get their data siloed in the right way? >> those are exam ples of bad engineering. we had those same concerns. just fix it. these are poorly designed systems. a.i. can rearrange the system and tell you where the vulnerabilities. if you want to worry about something, worry about it being stolen. >> the large language models? >> exactly.

>> the open source? it is built for stealing. >> designed to be delivered and checked by the deliverer before made open. >> eric schmidt. the book is called "hope and human spirit." good to see you. thank you. "squawk box" is coming right back after this.

welcome back, everybody. we have breaking news from merck. anjelica peebles is here with more. >> that's from a phase three trial in lung cancer. the shot takes two to three minutes versus the infusion.

it is a way for merck to bring forward keytruda. sales were $25 billion last year. a new form of keytruda would be protected for longer and a new version could be attractive for doctors and patients. merck sees a big opportunity and will discuss the results with regulators asap. that stock up 2%, becky. >> we're watching that right now. it looks like it is moving around up by $1.65. in terms of what this could mean with keytruda off patent, what portion of the market would it be? >> it's a good question. we have to see how it shakes out. you have to imagine that payers are not necessarily going to want to go for the more expensive version even if it is more convenient. so, it is hard to say right now at this point how that breakdown will be. again, merck see as opportunity to hold on to a portion of the

sales. >> i guess the other question would be if it is injectable versus iv, can you do it yourself versus going into the hospital setting? is that cheaper in terms of overall delivery? >> you will still go to the physician's office versus the injectables like the glp-1s. if you do to the doctor's office and inject for two minutes over sitting in a chair for 30 minutes, it is a more convenient option for patients. >> anjelica, thank you. it is now just before 7:00 a.m. on the east coast. i'm andrew ross sorkin along with joe kernen and becky quick on a tuesday morning. tuesday? >> i think so. >> hard to remember these days. i want to get to the big breaking news and the war in ukraine. this morning, vladimir putin signing a revised doctrine that lowers the threshold for the use

of nuclear weapons. putin saying any skroengs conve attack on russia supported by a nation of nuclear is an attack. bloomberg cites ukrainian military officials that ukrainian armed forces carried out the first strike in the border region with the russian territory with u.s. made army tactical missile systems. the defense ministry confirmed that report. we're trying to see what will happen next. take a look at futures because they are reacting to this report this morning. dow off 256 points. s&p 500 off 22 points. nasdaq off 51 points. we'll also tell you where treasuries are. you can look there at the ten-year at 4.38. two-year at 4.2. let's talk oil, gold and bitcoin as well in terms of the energy world. $68.63 if you want to buy a barrel of wti crude.

that down just a little less than 1%. then gold, take a look at where gold stands. up just a bit. $2,632. flip it around to show bitcoin as well. that actually moved up as well. sometimes it moves down. you never really know what it is trying to suggest here. >> 250. >> $91,720. let's get to contessa brewer's free act movers. good morning. >> good morning. let's start shares oogle down around a percent on the push that the doj is pushing to spin off chrome. continued legal troubles here for the parent company alphabet. a u.s. district judge already ruled in august that google has a monopoly on its search engine and alphabet shares for the year we've seen up nearly 25% year-to-date. we'll be following that court case and see what happens. trump media shares have dropped more than 5% premarket after reports that it's in advanced talks to acquire crypto firm

backed. trump has demonstrated interest in the crypto space and wants a national crypto stockpile and the trump family launched crypto platform world liberty final. look at bakkt up almost 14% even as trump declines. super micro the largest s&p premarket gainer up more than 24% after announcing bdo as its auditor and submitting its compliance plan to the nasdaq. previous auditor ey resigned in october after short seller hindenburg research released a report flagging accounting irregularity. the chipmaker still needs to file its year-end 2024 report. look at the shares up 17.5% right now. this is a breath of fresh air for investors who have seen this stock tumble since its 2024 highs in march. joe? all right. contessa, thanks. walmart posted this report.

courtney reagan is here with the numbers. >> walmart reporting adjusted earnings of 58 cents on revenue of $169.6 billion. that's just for a quarter. the world's largest retailer upping its full-year earnings, sales and guidance with this one important quarter left for the holiday. total gross margin up 21 basis points, operating income up 8.2%. both of those metrics were stronger in the u.s. segment. walmart's u.s. comparable sales at 5.3%. that's beating consensus by a decent margin. general merchandise growth for a second quarter in a row. the retailer calls out broad-based strength across merchandise categories and channelses. strong transactions counts and unit volumes as well. share gains primarily from upper income households. e-commerce sales up 22%, global xlers up 27%. advertising up 27% globally, 26% in the u.s. i spoke briefly with the cfo

john david rainey who added walmart has had 30% of customers order paying something more to get the delivery within an hour or three hours, which means e-commerce is getting close to profitability. he also added that e-commerce is 18% of total sales. that's up 300 basis points from last year. and on the consumer, rainy said what we're seeing right now feels consistent with prior quarters. consumers are spending more on food, buying general merchandise items, but also being discerning, joyful waiting until a better price point on items. on potential tariffs under the incoming administration, rainy said about two-thirds of the items we sell are made, grown or assembled in the u.s. tariffs are inflationary for customers so we want to work with suppliers on our own private assortment to try to bring down prices. >> yeah. 87 bit. 8722. all-time closing high is 8579.

so that's closing in on $700 billion market cap. all-time high for walmart. >> quite hefty for this. we call it the world's largest retailer. by revenue it is. e-commerce is growing. amazon beats it in just e-commerce. >> this is different because they're saying that they're raising guidance because of the trends they expect, not from what we've seen like we heard from home depot. this is a sign of strength. i don't know if it it's a sign of the strength for the consumer or walmart. >> we tried to tease that out to see what they would say. the trends we're seeing feels good. the consumer feels consistent. they think the macro environment has not deteriorated and sort of giving themselves credit for things they've done. early october sales. they are seeing some sales in stronger categories called out earbuds but saying, you know, apparel sales are still on the weaker side. obviously, weather has been an issue. no one wants to buy coats when 80 degrees on halloween. there's puts and takes there.

yes, i think upping these three metrics going into this very important final quarter, is a good thing. >> i guess if you're the stocks you own aren't all-time highs you would be questioning what's happening since most of the averages are close. probably not -- >> a lot of that is from the magnificent seven. >> it is. >> but in the dow when the dow hits new highs it's 30 dow components. thanks. coming up, martha stewart out with her 100th book. she'll join us straight ahead. "squawk box" right back.

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trade pmr, a platform for registered investment advisors. trade pmr has $40 billion, 350 firms right now. the acquisition allowing robinhood to offer investment advisory services to its customers. just another example as we've been watching robinhood really expand from what was just an app into a much more fully featured company that has all sorts of different services. when we come back a lot more on "squawk." aperture investor peter krause will be with us. the market's reaction to ukraine hitting russia with u.s.-made missiles. we're watching it and we'll talk to him about that and so much more. russia state media saying anti-missile systems downed five out of six missiles and debris from one missile fell on the territory of a military facility. more details as we get them this morning as the breaking news continues right here on "squawk box."

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(gentle breeze) - [announcer] eyes forward. don't drive distracted. welcome back, everybody. markets this morning reacting to ukraine hitting inside russian territory with u.s. supplied missiles. joining us to talk about the market's reaction and the bigger forces, peter kraus, chairman and ceo of aperture investors. the immediate reaction this morning is a muted one. we're continuing to watch geopolitical events. we did see futures drop. not a massive move. maybe down a little over a half a percentage point for the dow. it's port of the continuing issue. the bigger forces moving the markets are the trump election and the new administration coming in and then what the fed does as a reaction to the economy. how do you add this up?

when we started the year you had a pretty optimistic outlook. you changed it in july to say you were a little more concerned about some of the things that could be happening. how do you feel right now? >> well, it's a little uncertain and i think the market is reflecting that. volatility since the election, inside the market, the volatility has actually increased significantly between different stocks and bonds. and the market itself has been kind of listless, not directional. >> that first week there was a pretty big move. >> up, but then down 2%. it's part of the volatility. i think this is uncertainty here. we don't know what the administration is going to do with tariffs. we don't know what they're going to do on immigration. we don't know what they're going to do on taxes. we know what broad headlines are. we don't know exactly what's going to impact the different parts of the economy, and people are going to allocate capital and make big investments. i think we will grow. i think there will be growth here. i think 18 months, two years,

we'll see significant injection of capital into the economy. there's manufacturing is relatively low, destocking has been taking place over the last two years. we should see restocking and should see growth. but i think people are going to wait and investors are going to watch, but ceos will wait to see how this clears up before they start spending capital. >> if we see growth, is that growth strong enough that -- how the fed plays into some of this too, this has been a huge win where we've had a pretty strong economy, companies have been able to continue to deliver on bottom line, and it's all happening while the fed's moving to move interest rates lower and that's a pretty hard force to change. >> yeah. i think the fed is going to continue to lower rates, but at a slower pace. i think the short rates are probably still too elevated for a normal environment, so you'll probably see 25 basis points in december and next year probably

25 to 50 basis points. but i don't think, unless the economy gets really hot and inflation comes back in force, i don't think that the fed is going to reverse that. >> okay. >> and i don't think the fed is going to drive rates down to some lower level unless there's a recession. >> so if you have that massive deregulation and lower taxes -- which we don't know what taxes are going to look like, but it's a safe bet taxes will be lower than they would have been under the harris administration and probably than where they are now -- >> i think you will have growth and the market will do reasonably well to well. and companies earnings will do well. the intersensitive assets will struggle because rates are not going to come down that much. private equity, real estate, things like that, that are sensitive to levels of interest rates will have to not struggle but figure out how to restructure themselves in that environment. >> what's that mean for housing which has been a big issue? >> i think people's incomes will

grow and i think they will be able to afford at least to fix their houses and change things. you'll see housing-related stocks or stocks that affect improvements in housing do reasonably well. how it's going to affect home builders, you know, that's a little bit of a challenge because, you know, interest rates are very stens sensitive to those kinds of activities and that falls in the real estate camp it will be more challenging for that to grow. >> one of the real areas of uncertainty is probably in the medical arena, not just pharmaceutical companies but any of the insurers, hospitals, any of these companies could be facing some pretty significant changes. it's hard to argue that things aren't broken in some of the arenas there. >> well, it's been broken for many years. the question is, on the margin how will it get fixed and changed? look, i think the whole question about the delivery process for medicines will be questioned. we don't know how the next

administration is going to deal with vaccines. s so, you know, there are questions out there that have to get resolved and that -- early on parts of the market and capital. it will get clarified. we're going to see general growth in that space. >> what's your biggest takeaway or something you would tell investors you're watching out for right now? >> i don't think the market is going to go down here. forget 5, 10%. i don't mean that. i think the market will grow and equities will do well the next 18 months to two years. bonds are not going to -- duration is not going to be cheap. i don't think the long end of the curve is going to get a lot more attractive. i think the five-year and ten-year will be where it is or higher. >> regardless of what the fed does? >> regardless what the fed does, exactly. and look, growth on top of where we are in inflation, is probably going to keep inflation where it is to slightly higher. so if inflation gets 2.5 to 3

and you want a real rate of interest, you know, that's 4.5, you know, ten-year, maybe five, and that's what we should expect. so if you're thinking you're going to run your business with 4% or 3.5% ten-year, not unless there's a recession. >> peter, thank you. peter kraus. up next, oklahoma republican senator and p/e trump supper markwayne mullin will join us. and then author, entrepreneur, and ntertainer martha stewart will join us to discuss the launch of her new book a mh more. "squawk box" coming right back.

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perspective treasury secretary continues. joining us with his thoughts on who make the ideal candidate, oklahoma senator and trump supporter, markwayne mullin. senator, once again good to have you on this morning. >> thanks for having me on, joe. >> earlier we were talking about this and something interesting came to mind and that is we know how much the president likes rising stock prices and sometimes it almost -- it appears that a measure of how well, he thinks he's doing depend on the stock market, and

we said so okay, that's an important component for treasury secretary, someone that can deliver that. also, the president wants someone on board with his economic plans, which include tariffs, and our point was, wow, that is a difficult line to toe, if you will, to try to be fully behind him on tariffs and yet be able to do all that he can to -- or he or she can to raise stock prices. is that incongruous? >> one thing we know the president knows business. he's been very successful in business, very successful in running campaigns. he knows how to surround himself with the right people. i wouldn't say that the president loves tariffs. what he loves is free trade. he loves access to markets. and what he has said multiple times about the tariffs he's tired of selling out america. we need to be on an even playing field. people shouldn't just have access to us and us not access to them. if they want to have free trade,

meaning that we have complete access to their markets and they have the same access to us, then we are -- we're talking about having no tariffs. if you want to have just access to us and not give us access to you, your market, your population base, then we're going to even the playing field by the tariffs. i don't think that's a hard market to sell. i think that is just putting america first and that's what president has talked about. quit letting people take advantage of america. people are sick of it. that's why the american people overwhelmingly voted for president trump in a way none of us predict blood. >> do you have a preference and do you have any -- something that we don't know? do you know anything we don't know about who's in the pole position to finally -- >> well, obviously, there's a lot of names being floated around. but i would say there's been a lot of names floated for a lot of these positions and then someone else comes out that the president wasn't really leaking, wasn't letting known that he was even paying attention to. the president is going to make his own decision regardless of

what the transition team says, regardless of who they vet. at the end of the day the president will take the recommendation, but then he's going to make his own choice. we've all heard the names that have been floated but none of us know who is going to be there at the end of the day. >> senator, we've heard in many different variations of, well, this transition team is going to do different things than what happened the last time that president-elect trump was president. that includes people have attributed maybe a loyalist rather than some of the things that happened last session. jeff sessions i mentioned a lot. the president definitely wants to make sure he doesn't get into a position where he has someone that -- that goes totally off the reservation with what he does. you remember what happened with jeff sessions. he accused himself from the whole russia thing. that might explain a lot of things, and i know you have said you've been asked at least two

dozen times about the president's pick, the president-elect pick for attorney general matt gaetz. how do you really explain that? the amount of political capital that we're seeing expended here and just -- and even if you're on the president's side and even if you, you know, are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, that is a -- a glaringly controversial pick for a lot of people. >> well, here's -- there's no doubt and no question, matt gaetz, and i have had our differences. they have been very public. however, i respect the president, and i respect his ability to put good people around him. one thing we have here is we have an incoming president that's been there and done the job for four years. he knows exactly what he's looking for. so you have to trust that -- that decision making as he moves forward. it's not like he's brand new. he's the 45th president. now he's the 47th president. he did an excellent job as a

45th. he comes into the 47th with a tremendous amount of experience and knows what his team has to get done and knows where he's going, and he only has four years to do it. regardless of the differences that matt gaetz, and i have, i have to set those to the side a little bit and i have to do my job, my constitutional duty on article 2 section 2 i have to advise and consent, have oversight and we'll do that with every one of these picks and we're going to do it in a quick fashion because the president wants to get to work and congress wants to deliver the mandate that the american people gave us. >> i think if we knew for sure that that would happen, we'd probably feel better. i mean you -- you've seen -- i think you've reported that you saw some of the behavior that people are raising an eyebrow at. you're familiar with it. >> i am. >> you're saying we need to give him consideration. will that include a full vetting from the senate or if it was a

recess appointment -- >> absolutely. >> it will? because if it was a recess appointment or some other thing that the president is floating, i saw about a way of subverting it that could get him for 201 days or something, would you be okay if that's the way that matt gaetz ended up as attorney general? >> well, joe, keep in mind, that's very tough. the recess appointments have been talked about a lot, and i'm not saying that's out of question, but i'm saying that's a very difficult road it go through. remember, president obama tried to do this in 2014. we took him to court. the court overturned that. it's a very narrow window. it's -- when we decided to recess, it's not to -- it's not debatable, but it is amenable and that means that both chambers have to agree and both chambers can really muck that up. so it's very difficult to actually get there. and then if you do get there you have to recess for ten days and then the appointment is

temporary to begin with. it's only maximum two years or until the next congress starts. as you mentioned. and so the person still has to go through that confirmation period even if they are appointed under a recess. and that -- i'm going to say that is tough. now the president, under article 2 section 3, which has never been invoked could put us into recess if congress can't agree and set the amount of days that we're there. that is the last option. our job right now what we're focused on in the senate is to deliver these appointments as fast as possible and do our due diligence to look at everybody with a -- with a mandate of oversight. we will do that regardless of my personal opinion with matt gaetz. i will look at his appointment just like i will everyone else's. >> senator, can you do your job, your oversight, and look into this, if you don't have the investigation results from the house ethics committee on --

>> i believe we'll probably get that. becky, i believe we probably will get that. i think that's part of the oversight. now, if we get that in a -- in a secure setting to where we have to go down to the scif and read it, that's okay too. i'm not saying that the report has to be made public. i think that that's part of the oversight that the senate should have access to that, though. >> we've already heard from the lawyer of some of the people who did testify to the house ethics committee he had a client that testified that she had not only seen him pay for sex with women, but also engage in sex with a 17-year-old woman at a drug-fueled party. is that something that concerns you? >> well, if it is true, and i mean -- i got to say that, if that is true, now what i've said about matt gaetz is 100% true. every word i've said was accurate. but as i will say, we'll go through this process like we should, and if that is in the report, then that is going to be

very problematic to move forward. there's no question matt's going to have an uphill battle. it's going to be a really difficult fight to get him confirmed, but i'm not saying it's impossible. if it's what the president wants then we're going to do our due diligence, advise and consent with our constitutional authority, to do the oversight that we have to do. >> senator, let me ask you a different question, taking your own opinions about this off the table and even maybe taking some of the details of this report, which we don't fully know about, off the table, in corporate america and so much of corporate america watches -- is watching this broadcast, us talking right now, you know, if somebody -- an employee were to show another employee on a phone naked pictures of somebody that they're interacting with, in many companies that unto itself would be grounds for firing, meaning if you were to call the

hr department of most companies in the fortune 500 that would be the end. it wouldn't be a conversation about it after that. how do you think about that versus the circumstance that you're being tasked with today and do you think that corporate america is wrong to have those policies in place? >> well, andrew, i have to look at this in a different manner, right. his constituents is who elected him and his constituents knew exactly what it is. they retired him. if we're going back and going to start talking about scrutiny, different people who have been put in positions or appointed by presidents we have to scrutinize the appointments that president biden put in place too. we can talk about rachel, the assistant secretary of hhs, controversial questions, figuring out what pronoun is going to be used. sam, the department of energy, couldn't figure out if that was his luggage or not, and kept

stealing luggage. pete buttigieg to put him in charge of the department of transportation. if you're going to scrutinize you can go through appointments to the presidency and find reasons to scrutinize appointments. our job is to do oversight. if the president picked matt gaetz to be over doj we're going to do our due diligence and understand what the president is wanting there. >> and so we're going to treat this appointment like the senate has treated every other appointment from every other president. >> senator, i mean, i think the president swept seven states and, you know, won the popular vote and we saw that he probably, especially with everything he was -- went through, he probably is in a position where he feels he can do what he wants and probably wants loyalists. there is some 3d chess we don't understand that if there is a sacrificial lamb let's say it was matt gaetz that then maybe as much his other appointments somewhat controversial would be easier at that point?

is that in the back of his mind what's going on here, do you think? >> i don't believe so. i think the president wants a hammer at the doj, and he sees matt gaetz as a hammer and these other appointments. he's confident in where they're at and can deliver the administration that he's wanting. his picks have been maybe unconventional, but we hired an unconventional president. the american people wanted that. they don't want politics as usual. they want someone that's going to shake up washington, d.c., and president trump proved he could do that in 2016 and had great results with the economy that followed. the american people saw what happened under the biden administration, and it went to -- i am going to use good words here heck in a hand basket and then we see where the american people said we're tired of that and want something different. the american people want it to be shook up and the president is maybe using some picks for these positions that's not conventional, but it's what the american people wanted.

>> okay. senator, thank you for -- now it's two dozen and so now it's 25 times at least that you've answered those questions. appreciate you doing it for us this morning an thank you. thks for having me on. >> you're welcome. thanks. your record label is taking off.

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coming up, author and entrepreneur martha stewart is going to be with us to celebrate the release of her 100th book. we'll be talking to martha in just a moment. in the meantime take a look at the futures. we got some red on the screen. 231 points off on the dow, nasdaq down about 37 points, s&p off about 16 points, as some new geopolitical issues have emerged overnight between ukraine and ss.a we'll talk about that as well. "squawk box" coming right back.

(intercom) flight deck we are go for launch! (ethan) is that the one? (janet) so much space! that open kitchen! (tanya) ...is that a walk in closet? (ethan) i want those tiles! (intercom) boosters engaged. (ethan) wait! we've got a problem! (janet) problem?! (ethan) how can you sell your house when we're stuck on a space station for months???!!! (tanya) no, no! bad timing, janet!!! (janet) but that was the one!!!! (brian) no, no, no... opendoor!!

(tanya) don't open the door. (brian) opendoor gives you the flexibility to sell and buy on your timeline. (all) really? (brian) yea!!! (intercom) we have liftoff. (janet) nice! (janet) houston we have a playroom! (♪♪) (♪♪) (♪♪) everyone has goals and dreams. and everyone deserves a way to get there.

wherever you're going, getting there starts here. state street invest in your future with dia, the only etf that tracks the dow. (♪♪) ♪ >> welcome back to "squawk box." martha stewart is out with her 100th book titled martha the cookbook, live from bedford is

martha stewart, founder of martha stewart living, omni media. great to see you. >> thank you. >> congratulations. 100 books. >> yeah. well, i -- i have to catch up to -- >> can you remember all them? >> i have to catch up to danielle steele. she's done 200. >> how different do you think it is, when you think about when you wrote the first one, and today, just given the age of social media, even the role of books in our world today, how different really is it? >> it's a very different world. you can access recipes online so easily nowadays. it's just an incredibly different thing. but books, still, i like books. i think so many people in the kitchen like cookbooks. they like to hold the book, open it on the counter. this book is a very usable, workable book. and people are responding very favorably. we were in charleston over the weekend, and 1200 people came to the hall and held up their

books. it was quite amazing and quite nice to see that kind of interest in the printed word. >> but we should -- we're agreeing this is not the last book. i know we're celebrating 100. but it's not like the 100th and final. >> oh, gosh no. the 101st is already done. it's almost at the printer. and that is a gardening handbook which is beautiful. and then i'm already working on my auto y gravity and a book about my houses and vegetable gardening organically and many, many more hope. i like to write. it's a nice thing to do. >> well, talk about your auto biography, let's talk about the film version of that. a lot of vus been watching you on netflix, and i'm so curious what you actually think about this documentary? i've read some of the things you've said, but now that i have an opportunity to actually talk to you about it and watch it myself what's your true takeaway here? >> what did you think?

>> i liked it. i know you don't like certain parts of it, and i get that. i totally get that. but i thought in the end, that it -- i felt like i walked away loving you even more to be honest with you. i didn't think even the parts that you probably -- i could feel the speed bumps for you, i don't love that, but -- >> it's turned out to be much better than i thought. it was a slightly painful process to open up as i did to r.j. cutler, and it was -- and that's -- the time of life to do that, though. it's about time i spoke out a little bit about my personal life. but the response especially of young people, young women, love it. they love it. i think it's giving them some strength. it's giving them some energy. it's giving them a way to think about their future. that makes me very happy. there's still more to tell.

that's the documentary and possibly a martha 2 documentary that would be fun to do. and i'm -- i'm very excited that my life has taken this turn where people are actually responding to a woman's story. >> right. how much do you think your opinion has changed because of reaction. one of the things oftentimes people read a book about themselves or watch a film about themselves by themselves before it's out to the public and they feel every speed bump and they think it's terrible, invariably you think it's terrible, it gets out in the wild and you get calls from all sorts of people saying martha, isn't that great, right? >> my friend joel silver, the movie director and producer, he called me screaming how did i let that happen. it was the most horrible thing he ever saw. i love that about him. he is so outspoken. and then somebody else, ryan murphy called, and he said he loved it. so everybody has an opinion. and i love that they have opinions about it.

and i listen. i listen very carefully because next time martha 2 f there ever is one, will be even better and probably more interesting and more helpful to the viewer than this one. >> would it be a different team that did martha 2? >> oh, i don't know yet. i'm -- >> okay. >> just thinking about it. >> i think so. i like different music. i'm -- i'm an editor really and truly, and you never saw repetition in my magazine. so i wouldn't want to repeat. use a different photographer every year for fourth of july every year, for example. repetition is not my thing. >> did you see "snl" this weekend? >> i did. i thought it was hysterical. >> you know where i'm going with this. >> i'm glad you brought it up. can i straighten out one piece -- >> the whole thing for those folks if they don't know what we're talking about or explain it, martha. >> no. there was a lovely performer who was trying to explain the wordb-

it's sort of a social term now to somebody who is real cool. and she first says i'm cool because i was happy that andrea piser, who is a journalist for the "new york post," i say in the movie and i don't mention her name, right, you didn't hear her name in the movie, i mentioned she's dead, and i was happy she was dead. i wasn't talking about andrea piser, by the way. for why andrea piser thinks it was her i have no idea. but it was a little bit of sloppy fact-checking on the part of my team on the documentary. it was constance el hayes an equally divisive and dangerous new york journalist at the time of my trial. >> do you know martha i used to sit across from connie hayes. >> you know she died, right?

>> she passed away from cancer. >> i'm sorry for her family, but i did not like constance hayes and what she did to me every single day. it was horrible. and not very accurate and not very true and not very nice. and andrea pise wrote the same crap that she always writes, but i wasn't talking about andrea piser and she should get off her high horse and not think that i was thinking about her for the last 15 years. >> martha, we were looking at -- good to see you. we were looking at home through the -- for the recipes, and. >> thank you. >> do you have a -- we want to do some of them. then i was thinking, let's say snoop has a certain desire for wanting something really sweet or something he would like, were there any really good recipes in there for someone that -- you know, that might like that? i would like something --

>> he's talking about infusion. >> the apple crumb pie for thanksgiving is a must. and use as many different kinds of apples as you can. it really changes the texture and the taste of the apple pie. >> can you top it with gummies, martha? >> no, no, no. that's where joe is going. >> this is after you've already and then you -- >> after partake and then have the pie. >> the whole book looked good for that actually. >> the parchment turkey. that's a new recipe. it sort of takes the place of my cheesecloth turkey. but it is so -- the turkey comes out so deliciously. if you're looking for a new turkey recipe try that one. >> you won't blow the house up or get covered in grease? i'm scared of doing other things with the turkey. this is a safe way. >> it's the cleanest way i've ever cooked a turkey. it really is. >> parchment wrapped?

>> after you've stuffed the turkey and butter it nicely, then you wrap it in big sheets of parchment paper. you can use a staple gun or the bulldog clips from your desk and roast it in the parchment and then about a half hour before it's finished, you unwrap it, and it gets a beautiful, beautiful mahogany brown color. it's fabulous. >> and that's the alternative to using foil? because now we have the questions about wrapping -- >> no foil. i never cook with foil. >> i'm a new convert. >> cheesecloth is very good. you don't have to wrap your food in foil. >> perfect. >> martha stewart, on her 100th book. great to see you again and we hope to see you in person soon. thanks, martha. >> thanks so much. and your program is so good this morning. >> thank you. thank you. when we come back we've got new reports that the justice department will ask a judge to force alphabet's google to sell off its chrome internet browser. will it happen?

former u. .schief technology officer will join us to discuss.

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welcome back to "squawk box," everybody. private equity giant blackstone in talks to jersey mike's in a deal that would value the chain at about $8 billion. "the wall street journal" reports blackstone had been in talks earlier this year. the nation's second largest sub company by sales behind only subway. it has more than 3,000 locationsp joe? coming up, former u.s. chief technology officer aneesh chopra will join us to discuss google and the doj. roblox making a number of changes, giving parent s more power to protect online and in me. david baszucki will join us to discuss. we're coming right back. that's the power of curiosity. better questions can lead to better solutions.

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>> doj's reportedly going to ask a federal judge to force alphabet's sale of chrome in an antitrust crackdown. joining us aneesh chopra, white house chief technology officer under president obama, currently the chief strategy officer at arcadia.

you've got some guidelines for what would, perhaps, be a good remedy. does this fall in to that as far as your opinion goes? you say remedy should be surgical and tie back to the harms. does this work? is this a good solution? >> well, we got to see the details, but i would say in general, what we want to understand is, if the harm is that google is behaving in an anti-competitive manner because of its exceptional search product and you have to ask, what it is that we can do to mitigate the harms caused by reduction in competition. the provision that maybe didn't get as much attention but might actually be the sleeper opportunity is that google would open up access to its search technology through licensing agreements to third parties. this could be the most important part of the agreement. the chrome browser, obviously, does allow for google to personalize the search results because it follows us wherever we go on the internet so decoupling that will reduce the

personalization. but if there is an opportunity for competitors, new entrants to access that historical technology that is, obviously, dominating the way we search the internet today, it might mean more value-added services could come out to make that more competitive market what the regulators are asking for. it also might create some unintended consequences which we should probably cover. i don't want to give you a straight yes/no. i want to suggest context that there's potentially some good on the opening of the data and the licensing, and there may be some harm if the folks who come in on the other side end up being worse on privacy and worse on behaving in a way that are currently unregulated commercial internet market operates. >> you say that maybe the best thing would be enabling customer control over the ad network. does this do anything for that? >> well, that's what part of the issue is today in order to access the search experience that we like. we sort of have to go through the gauntlet of the engine that takes all of our personal data

and monetizes us as we go through the internet. if you can separate out the current way we access search and there's now a new competitive market, there could be options. someone could argue that i'll be wanting to give you access to the great search results at google but i will not take all of your data and harvest it for purposes of personalized ads.ad. that may be a better product for some of us that want more confidence that our privacy is preserved. that competition will create options. for others, you know what, i love the personalized ads. i might like that. it might introduce me to something i haven't seen before. you and i might have different ideas about what privacy means to us. that idea of consumer control is there will be many front doors to access the google experience and that could be a net positive to the american people. >> is this with a.i. and everything else, it almost feels like yesterday's battle or something. is it even going to be necessary? we may be doing something

totally different. we're going to make sure myspace is not a monopoly. >> this could be an accelerant to an a.i. -- we physically do the searching ourselves. very soon we'll be using a.i. agents that will search on our behalf knowing us in a more personalized way. so, it could be that the api access to google search is actually going to be rocket fuel for competitive a.i. products. that may be the biggest issue, if i were an investor in google, my biggest concern today is gemini probably has an advantage objecting able to access this incredible search capability. all else being equal, i might pursue the gemini a.i. product. look at all the new technologies that have come forward. a.i., anthropic, perplexity, and now they could access the google api, i might get a better result

because they could incorporate features beneficial to me. this could be the catapult to a.i. future where we delegate to agents -- >> let me ask a different question. how do you deal, for example, with email? >> right. >> i would tell you google has my email. i think the email is probably more valuable -- i don't even personally allow them to save the search. not everyone allows to save search by default. search results from even a year ago don't actually -- are probably less relevant to the actual system. it's probably just the last two weeks of search that might have great relevance to what you're doing here. how do you think about all the other data that companies have? how do you think about outlook that crosoft might have then? >> we will be asked to opt in on a whole range of services. back to this idea of agentic a.i. if we want a.i. to compete in a trust market, that agent will be authorized to have

access to our sensitive information. here's to your point. if you look at this -- of course, this ruling didn't affect gmail specifically. let me lift up more broadly. if we believe we want to give consumers control over how we log into different systems, whatever those systems are. salesforce and the enterprise or, you know, take your pick on the consumer side, travel, et cetera, well, the question is, at the moment, it's unclear, can i delegate an agent to interact with my personal services on my behalf? is that going to be an open and competitive market, or am i going to be forced to use the agents at each vertical silo? i don't think we received any kind of regulatory or market feedback yet. >> there's a security issue. >> of course. >> but this idea that somehow the agent is going to be able to pull from 100 different places, that scares people. it's why people like the apple phone. it's all in one place. it's all controlled by one company. some people think that's too much control, but on the flipside, you know, if all of a

sudden you a.i. agents crossing from, one data pool to another data pool to another data pool, and somehow information comes out of that that's not supposed to come out of that, that's a much bigger problem i would argue than this competitive issue you're describing. >> that's why if you recall, we talked in the past, having the industry self-regulate on key questions about what it is that those agents can or cannot do with our data and what control panels, knobs and dials we have to control that is critical. without guardrails it could be a scenario where we're attracted to the honey of a new product or service. it's done harm to us -- privacy and security go hand in hand. for lack of a better term, a chooe chinese app trying to embed low cost options but harvest all this information to do harm. this is an issue we have to grapple with. separate from today's ruling -- or the argument the justice

department is making, but broadly we need more stakeholders involved and setting the rules of the road. this is going to run much faster than a government agency can regulate and left to its own devices we might have people take a shortcut approach. what you said, andrew, is the harm is my number one concern at the moment. that's why we need a place for industry consensus. >> thank you. good to have you on. >> thanks for having me. >> stock futures this morning have been weak. they did pull back after some news, this news. russia's ministry of defense saying ukraine struck a facility inside its borders with american made long-range -- longer range missiles. that came days after the u.s. gave ukraine approval to use the weapons. in a separate development, russian president vladimir putin formally lowered the threshold for his country's use of nuclear weapons. joining us now on the markets,

mark znagle, more than $17 billion in assets under management. one of the things -- it's good to have you on. great to have you in. you do deal in the possibility of black swan events, i guess. so we ratchet it up a little bit this morning or not to worry? >> i mean, we don't really look to short-term fluctuations too much, but i do think we're at a worry a little bit. you know, it's been -- it would have been a lot more bullish the last two years because i think we're in this goldilocks zone right now. i feel like we'll remain in it a little more. i think we'll look for a little more euphoria. i think there's -- we're still part of this boom/bust cycle and i think that's an inevitable thing we're in. >> but next year maybe not so much. >> exactly. i think we have to -- lag

effects are important in this business. and i think it's easy for us to forget that and it's kind of the reason -- lag effects are the reason bernanke got so blindsided at the gfc. what goldilocks zones are, when you're in this immediate effect, positive environment, and sort of overlapping lag effects. i think that's where we are right now. >> go ahead. >> the boom and bust effect, is that ever since the covid pandemic when things went down or are you talking about broader boom and bust? >> definitely broader. i think that ultimately boom and bust cycles are caused by monetary policy. you know, we can't put the genie back in the bottle from what really started at the gfc. i really think that's what's driving everything ultimately. >> all the other things that we talked about won't be what gets us, though. it will be another mistake in monetary policy, in your view? >> yeah. i mean, i think that -- i think that ultimately what happened in

'22, i thought that was an enormous mistake. when people thought that, you know, we were in the '70s, that was their investment thesis. i thought that was profoundly wrong because of the levered -- we have the largest credit bubble, i would argue, in human history up. can't just tighten into that. i don't think we'll see a run of the mill business cycle again. so, yeah, that was a mistake. but of course the real mistake is what happened, you know, 15 years earlier today. so, yeah, ultimately, these are the mistakes that happened. i think truly the fed is behind the curve right now. even though i hate looking like a fed apologist. you'll never find someone who's more anti-fed. end the fed is something i would be in favor of. you'll never find a more negative person on the fed than myself. >> who should be controlling monetary policy if not the fed? not the president. how should we do it? there are people that point out, we haven't always had the fed.

there are those that it's almost a religion, fed independence, but you're just giving, you know, there's a lot of people who can screw up monetary policy. it could be the fed, it could be the president, it could be congress. is this the best way to do it or is this ruls-based? >> to me i'm more of a purist. it begs the question, why should there be monetary policy? we believe in free markets. why shouldn't that be the case for interest rates as well? yeah, i think we're better off. when we set interest rates and why should the bureaucracy -- bureaucrat in washington tell us what interest ates should be? it creates distortions in the market ultimately. >> but then there's times where we thank the fed for saving our bacon, right? no? >> well, of course. that's the thing. but it creates these other problems, creates moral hazards. we know all these problems. this is typical of government

policy. the effects tend to come later. we create these puric victories. it's easy to forget who caused the real problems. this is really what governments do. >> you sell your products of -- from the goat farm, like the goat cheese, right, but do you like the goats? because i love -- i've been to places where there are dwarf goats. i could say -- my whole family could say all day. there's something about the serenity of animals. i think that's why they're rescue animals. you like your goats or -- >> that's a heck of a segue. do you use your goats? >> these are in the notes. but you still have the goat farm, right? >> of course, of course. >> is it just to sell goat cheese or do you love your goats? >> we could go on and on. it's more than that. we do regenerative pasture management. it's much more than that. but goats are couldle. >> i've been there. we go to this place in the

desert and we spent hours sitting next to -- i mean, they pee all over -- they're so docile and affection yat. i've got four dogs, maybe that's it. these are full-size goats. >> yeah, french alpine goats mainly. >> do you know anything about goats, sorkin? >> i know very little about goats. i'm not a goat expert. >> when i say goat you think tom brady, right? ed. >> jordan usually. michael. >> michael, okay. >> maybe serena williams. >> i'll warn you next time. >> it was good. >> thank you. coming up, we will talk to you some more goats. no, we'll talk more about real important news actually happening right now that's impacting the markets and potentially the world. a report that ukraine is striking inside russia with former deputy assistant secretary of defense, elbridge colby is joining us next.

take a look at the futures. you'll see dow futures down by 210 points. we've been there through most of the show this morning. a lot because of what's happening in ukraine. >> we told you a few minutes ago about ukraine, striking inside russia with u.s. supplied longer range missiles. also russian -- president vladimir putin formally lowering the threshold for his country's use of nuclear weapons. joining us now on this, elbridge

colby, former deputy assistant secretary of defense. i we'll start with these comments from putin. to be expected given that the biden administration okayed the use of these? is this the response you would have -- not necessarily a huge escalation, i would hope, from putin but just a quid pro quo for that move? >> good to be with you, joe. i think the lowering of the threshold by putin has been for quite some time. it is significant to suggest the russians may use nuclear weapons in a broader range. i would see russia's response, what putin has said in the past is there could be horizontal steps, for instance, aid to houthis, north korea, china, to iran itself. we'll see if there's further responses by russia. there's also reports there may be further sabotage in the north sea, for instance. so, we should -- i think that's

the kind of thing we would expect. >> even though they use the threat of, perhaps, a nuclear escalation, that's not what he meant, he'll accomplish it through more conventional means that -- almost sounds like an iran proxy. >> there's that. this is something to underline, how badly the situation, president biden said yesterday the situation for ukraine is extremely difficult. this is after three years of the biden administration policy and russia is continually upping the ante. i think the biden administration response here, given the transition period, it's kind of like -- "the new york times" is reporting that the biden administration doesn't even think it's going to make a big difference, that neither the ukrainians or we ourselves have

efficient attack them in the inventory to make a difference. the ft is reporting the ukrainians have used it -- the russians have moved a lot of their forces. they adapted to this possibility. they are claiming they shot down several. we don't know. i'm not saying it's not nothing but it's a significant escalation on our part where we really don't think it's going to make a difference. it's a real -- as i said, expression of the biden administration's kind of symbolism over effectiveness policy that i think president trump, we need to come in as soon as possible to deliver good results for the american people and, frankly, our allies. >> what was the rationale, then, do you think that we're still -- it's almost like a last gasp sort of all in for ukraine from this administration? >> it's not even all in. >> symbolically, that's what they're saying, we're still helping ukraine, wait until trump gets in here and pulls the rug out from under ukraine?

>> they tied it to the north korean troops but it's not really tied to that. frankly, i think the best explanation is peer pressure from the europeans. my own view is put your money where the mouth is. secretary of nato, he was prime minister of netherlands while spending in exto nothing on defense for ten years. the american people as president trump has pointed out have spent a tremendous amount of money in weapons and despite a lot of rhetoric, the europeans aren't doing it. french and germans are cutting aid. what's happening here? i think trying to make peace and get the europeans to step up is the right policy proposal and i think that's what president trump has expressed. >> was there a true shift in europe from we need to see this through to, i don't know what the end ever looked like, but to now, do they actually shift and say, okay, some type of

negotiated peace settlement is in the interest of all of us at this point, whether it's ceding land that russia had? did they really change? >> i think you see that happening. chancellor scholz spoke with vladimir putin. i think that's -- people see that and, frankly, i think you're seeing movement from kyiv itself from the ukrainians. hopefully some receptivity on the part of the europeans. >> do you know pete hegseth, bridge? >> i know him by reputation. i certainly admire his service to our country, his commitment to president trump's america first foreign policy, his connection with service members and so forth. so -- but we don't have a close personal relationship or anything like that. >> do you expect you will? >> no presumptions. i'm just excited -- don jr. put

something out earlier today. president trump is putting people like pete hegseth, who is very qualified, great american patriot, articulate spokesman, but who will implement president trump's own vision he got elected on. that's what people should key in on. i'd be honored to help contribute to that cause wherever i am. >> elbridge kol colby, former - that was in the trump administration first time, right? >> right. >> okay. excellent. thanks, bridge. >> thanks, joe. when we come back, the fate of one of the most recognizable sports themes in television history, composer john tesh will join us on round ball rock and whether we'll hear it from nba comes back next year.

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♪ ♪ well, for basketball fans going back to the 1990s, a few notes of john tesh's "roundball rock" can transport them back to the nba on nbc. as nbc sports gears up for its multibillion dollar broadcast deal starting next season, they have teased the return of tesh's iconic theme but so far hasn't secured a license deal. joining us right now is john tesh. we should mention nbc has no official comment on the negotiations over "roundball rock." john be, i just want to welcome you. first of all, for anybody who

wasn't watching last week, we did a segment with alex sherman, a reporter from cnbc, talking about how these negotiations had been taking place, talked a little bit about it. and i made an unkind comment that i feel pretty bad about. i said, it sounded dated. i heard you talk about it on a podcast. i felt really bad. i love "roundball rock." i love you, john, and we're happy to have you here to talk about this today. thank you. >> this is so funny. you didn't have to reach out, but on the podcast i just thought, hey, listen, this song is not -- this song -- i'm -- this song is not dated. all those sounds are coming back. i tell you what, nobody else on "squawk box" reached out. it was just you. and so -- >> none of us -- >> i was the only one who said something bad. >> we didn't insult you. i said you were like top gun. i said you were like kenny loggins. >> i get the top gun credit,

dude. >> i get caddy shack. >> well, anyway, i mean, quickly before we get into it, i have to tell you that i have -- i'm sending you something, becky. this is -- this is an old school, dated sound synthesizer. you can see i wrote on there, dated sounds for becky, and i signed it. >> oh, my god. john, i love this. >> you could do the top gun sound, the "roundball rock" sound. you have to report this to the nasdaq but maybe you can auction it off. >> that's a good idea. that's fantastic. >> the old sound is back. >> you know, john, we talked about this. we got into a little bit about how -- you can tell us the timeline on some of these things. maybe we should start with that. "roundball rock" is a song everybody knows. it's a song everybody gets excited about. when nbc put out the release

saying you were going to be back with that, there was some fan excitement online about that. i guess we haven't completely negotiated a deal. there is no rights deal just yet. what happened? >> well, yeah, they released a press release saying they got the rights to nba. which was amazing. in that they included they were bringing "roundball rock." we hadn't talked yet. the good news is, because you guys were squawking about it and watergate reporter alex sherman reported on it, so now we are talking. >> yea. >> wher i need anything, i'm going to call you guys. no. so, we are talking and it's great. you know, it's funny because i watched -- i didn't see it live and i watched the video of you guys. it sounded like edward r. murrow from london. john tesh is playing "roundball rock," john tesh is holding out. the internet picks it up, john tesh is holding out. i'm not holding out. nbc is my friend.

the new president of nbc sports is incredible. i mean, this guy is launching nbc sports into a new era. and the guy has six emmys. so, it's -- you know, all i'm doing right now is, i mean, we have to put together something and i'm looking forward to working with these guys. >> well, we're thrilled to have you back in the fold. >> not only did i not say it was dated, i said i thought i heard it last week watching a basketball game. >> you did. >> that's how fast 20 years goes now, john, as you probably -- >> you thought you heard it at the supermarket. >> are you sure it's not still -- i was watching -- >> john, talking about dated or updating it, one thing you said on the podcast, which i enjoyed watching, was the idea you might actually tinker with it a little bit. is that what you were intim intimating?

>> orchestra? >> guys. we went to the legendary ocean way recording in nashville and recorded several versions. on some podcast i said i was going to rerecord, people said, no, no, don't touch it and we like the og version. i had to ask my daughter what that meant. there are three versions now. next year is going to be a big year for us because we'll release a new sports record that will have all three versions of it. we're going to do a thing called "roundball rock" battle of the bands, contests between high school bands, and we'll give away hundreds of instruments. it's going to be great, just leading up to the new season. >> you thought about giving it away or selling it to private equity and having them do negotiations with it. what changed your mind? >> it was my 12-year-old granddaughter. she said, no, pop pop -- we're very close. she said, pop pop, no, you can't

sell this song. and said -- all three of my grand kids, 12, 10 and 8, they can play the song on piano, but my 12-year-old the other day said, pop pop, i've been playing this "roundball rock" for a while. it's pretty easy, there are a lot of white keys. i said, shut up, kid. they're all into it. the funny thing about all of this is i don't think anybody would have predicted charles barkley would be on espn, al michaels would be amazon sports and "roundball rock" would be back on nbc. it's dogs will be friends with cats or -- it's one of the biblical signs of the end of the world, but i'll take it. >> we have plenty of other indications of that. >> do we get to talk about "entertainment tonight" and mary hart. john, i grew up watching you. this is incredible to me that we're even having this conversation. >> it's, well, listen, i -- the first time you guys said something about it, i got so many texts from all of my

friends saying that, hey, hey, did you know you were on "squawk box"? not one of my friends could spell squawk. now they're all huge fans. >> john, we want to thank you. we have data we're late to get to. i want to say thank you, you know, for being gracious when i reached out. >> we'll see. >> no, no. he immediately got back with me. i was texting back and forth with him while we were on the show. he said he might come on this week. i teased it. i said, he is coming on this week. then i realized i did the same thing, i got excited and spouted off before i should have. thanks for being great all the way around. >> the world of geopolitics is this big, but i appreciate talking to you guys about it. >> we appreciate talking to you, too. john tesh. >> thanks. rick santelli standing by at the cme in chicago with breaking housing data. hey, rick. >> joe, indeed. these are october reads for

housing starts and permits. remember, we had storm milton in october, helene in november. that follows a slightly revised 1,353,000. that is the lightest rate since july. that july rate on starts was the weakest going back all the way to 202 is. we want to be careful here and point out that it's also between single and multifamily due to interest rate levels and land-locked owners really have been underperforming, so single family new construction has been kind of the star. the percentage of those homes have grown over historic standards. if we look at permits they were down 1,416,000.

that follows 1,425,000. so less than a 1% drop. also the lightest rate since july. we want to continue to monitor this. if you recall, close your eyes and vision a chart of ten-year yields and how they moved in october. they basically moved in october from below 3.80 to well over 4.40 -- excuse me, 4.20-ish. we know interest rates moved higher and they continue to be the linchpin of the housing market. we do see that rates haven't moved much but they were already down coming into this number, joe. 4.22 on a ten, down half a dozen basis points. a parallel shift on the curve. this consolidation we've seen in closing yields on long-dated treasuries is starting to slip a bit. we had four sessions in a row

where we were closing between 4.42 and 4.45. yesterday we were a bit lower. it looks like we're losing a bit of that momentum. it doesn't price me that 4.50 has been a breaker for ten-year yields but i wouldn't look for a huge amount of retrenchment. back to you. >> does it matter what goes on -- well, hopefully nothing -- i thought it was a flight to safety from what's happening in -- far, far away. that's not what's happening? >> well, i do think there is some of that in there. actually with the counterfactual not known, what you bring up is a great point. if we're hovering right now, still very close to the mid-4.30s and ten-year with that effect in. what happens when it turns around a little bit? i just think the scale of interest rates, especially from 7s out to 30s has stacked up. i continue to point to the fact that two-year note yields is

going to reflect more of the sentiment to the fed, even though they may not be easing as much as we anticipated, let's say, half a year ago, i think feel good presentation the fed will give about the easing cycle will continue to keep short rates a little more well behaved than long end. >> who would make the best treasury secretary, rick? >> i don't know. i haven't gotten that phone call. i'm a little surprised. >> i know. but -- >> out of the once you know, is there one -- you went to the most hawkish treasury secretary, strongest dollar guy -- gal or guy? >> i hope it's not a labor economist right off the get go. i kind of like our buddy, our old buddy from cnbc. i think kudlow would make a great treasury secretary. >> that's interesting. free markets, best path to

prosperity. i say that a lot, too. >> absolutely. >> i think he tried to trademark that. thanks, rick. diana olick joins us not on the treasury secretary pick necessarily, but if you want to opine on that as well? >> no, i do not. i'll talk housing. i want to continue on what rick was saying about the mortgage rates during october. we started with the average on the 30-year fixed at around 6.2% at the start of october. it shot up over 7% by the end of the month. so, that's what home builders were looking at during october as they were starting homes. and you do see the bulk of this drop, this unexpectedly lower drop we saw in housing starts was mostly single family. you saw single family month-to-month down about 7%. multifamily was actually up month-to-month about 10%, still down year over year because multifamily has an oversupply. they're still drawing down. we've seen that all year. single family, though, still needs much more construction. we're down 0.5% year over year

in october. not a good sign for that. the uilders were seeing higher mortgage rates. i want to talk about the weather effect. we did see a big drop in the south on housing starts. single and multifamily. that due to the hurricanes. we also, though, saw a big drop in the northeast. you can't blame it all on the weather. but builder sentiment has been going up. we saw it tick up in the report yesterday which was for november. builders seem to be expecting mortgage rates to ease down a little bit, perhaps more of that is the share of big builders who are able to buy down rates. they're also pleased with the potential for president-elect trump opening up for federal lands and the opportunity to get more homes built on more land. these numbers looking backwards, we saw rates kind of normalize in november but we're still up over 7%. the builders have a long road ahead. i want to throw in they've seen lumber prices spike due to several reasons in the last several weebz. we're at the highest level of

the year. for framing lumber, prices are up 20% year over year. that has to do with very low supply right now for lumber and high demand as we look at going into the spring season, they start to buy their lumber now. back to you guys. >> diana, thank you. when we come back, a lot more on "squawk." roblox david will be joining us. ? boring does. boring makes vacations happen, early retirements possible, and startups start up. because it's smart, dependable, and steady. all words you want from your bank. for nearly 160 years, pnc bank has been brilliantly boring so you can be happily fulfilled... which is pretty un-boring if you think about it.

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welcome back to "squawk box." roblox rolling out safety updates to the popular gaming platform, including remote parental controls and content labeling. roblox has been under fire on safety issues since a report last month since activist short seller hindenberg research saying . they called the report misleading. joining us right now first on krrns is roblox ceo david

baszucki. we've been talking for many years about your site and the company and trying to keep kids safe. you're rolling out a whole number of products and features. i'm happy you're doing this because it sounds like maybe i'll be able to control what my kids are doing more than i was able to. explain what exactly you're doing and how you're addressing this. >> andrew, thank you for having me and us on this show. we want to highlight what a priority safety is on our platform. we released so many safety updates throughout the year, but the one we did on monday was a real big one. it's all about allowing parents to transparently connect with the digital lives of their kids on roblox. the first thing we did was announce parent accounts. parent accounts -- we think all parents should have a roblox account as well. when a parent links their

parents account to their kid's account, they can work with friends list, screen time if they want and work with experience guidelines and the content their kids will see. the second thing we released is a new way of looking at experienced guidelines that are a lot closer to what parents are familiar with, which is how the movie industry thinks about content. so, these are just really a continuation of our focus on safety and civility on roblox. >> dave, hindsight is 20/20. this hindenberg report has been a lot of spotlight on the issues on the site. i was not aware of some of the epstein island creations that kids had access to before. what was your reaction when you first read that report? putting aside the short sale on the company and clearly the incentives on their side economically at least, but when you read it, what did you think? >> i want to point out this is a

short seller report. we rejected all of the a littles of the report that roblox wasn't safe and civil. the big release that we did on monday was well in the works and well in the planning prior to this really report. as i highlighted, we're shifting safety and civility updates constantly. on the content side we have strong controls in place. we're onstantly scanning all of the content on the site, immediately taking down things that are not appropriate and taking a step back when we think about the company. we're really approach safety in a fundamentally different way. all of the text on our platform is filtered, all of the voice is filtered. we have teams of moderators. we really hold ourselves to a higher standard and put safety and civility as our top priority. >> but, dave, one of the real shifts i'm seeing, at least in

terms of the new releases is -- and you know this. i have two 14-year-old boys and a 7-year-old. and, you know, i remember back with the boys, but now with my daughter, she's talking to people that she does not know online, right? i've actually walked over to her ipad, and i'll say, who are you talking to? she'll say, i don't know. it's somebody. and, you know, i always flinch when that happens a little bit. i'm thinking to myself, is this a good person? a bad person? what do you do about it? i had had sons when they were 9 or 10 wanted to make robucks, which is the currency on roblox. the only way to make it is to be developers. they were trying to pretend they were 13 on the site. that's the only way to become a, quote, unquote, producer. >> you're highlighting things we

think about on the platform and things we take seriously. you're right. we want roblox to be a place where people get interested in s.t.e.m., in creation where they can ultimately create things that make a business on our platform. part of the success we had in this last quarter is millions of creators making awesome properties on our platform and making money from it. once again back to safety, i want to highlight our focus on this. all text on our platform runs through filters. all voice on our platform runs through filters. and we're more and more starting to lead the entry in the development of a.i. to support safety and civility. for instance, our voice filter, which we built internally, is now open sourced on hugging space and one of the top downloaded models for safety and civility and other companies are starting to adopt it.

we do want young people to get interested in s.t.e.m. and creating on roblox. we put enormous focus on safety and civility. >> dave, can i just ask, though, you said you're rejecting all of the claims that came from that hindenberg report. part of the claims were hat this was pedophile place. some areas were patterned after either epstein island or sean combs, p. diddy, and they were able to access those areas of the site even when they registered an account under the age of 13. do you reject all of those claims? >> yeah. so, this report claimed a bunch of things that anyone can go look up were patently false. they claimed we had twice the hours we state in our financial statements -- >> no, no, no. i'm not talking about the -- just on these claims themselves. is there --

>> on this claim, claiming child porn is being traded on roblox is ridiculous because we cannot share images on our platform. we have never allowed the sharing of images on roblox. it's part of being safe by default for all ages, not just younger, not just older players. in fact, we really because of this higher standard, we really work hard to prevent people on roblox from going anywhere else because other platforms do allow voice or image -- >> i think the question that we're trying to get at is, whether there are demonstrable photographs, as you and i know photographs to be, versus maybe a digital, animated version of pornography or people doing things that might be sexual in nature, are you rejecting the idea that the analyst or

investors in hindenberg that put that report together did not see what they said they saw? >> we reject there's any image sharing on roblox of pornography. we want to highlight we have systems in place to take down content that's not consistent with our guidelines. i also want to highlight in addition to that, what we're releasing on monday, in addition to content safety, is giving parents more control of what content is appropriate for kids of their age as well. >> all right. we always appreciate talking to you about this. i hope we get an opportunity to continue continue this conversation, so thank you. appreciate it. >> thank you, andrew. great to be on the sw.ho thank you. "squawk box" coming right back after this.

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contessa brewer joins us now for a look at some of the mornings top premarket movers. >> hey there, joe. let's start off with shares of lowe's now. we were falling in the premarket, despite beating across the board, down 1 1/3%

and raised full-year guidance but expects comp sales to decline next year. walmart surging on earnings today, posting better than expected revenues and profits. up 2.5% premarket growth. profits grew by 21 basis points. walmart raised guy dance, saying it's seeing a strong start to the holiday season. and rounding out with super micro, we're seeing it up 24.3%, after submitting its compliance to the nasdaq. the previous auditor resigned in october after a report that was released that flagged irregularities. back to you. >> contessa, thank you very much. let's take a broader look at the futures right now. they've taken another leg down this morning. you see the dow futures are down by close to 500 points, a drop of 483 points below fair value.

s&p futures down by 50, and the nasdaq down by 190. this is coming on some stepped up reports, more reports detailing what we have been talking about all morning since the futures first turned lower. at this point, russia's foreign minister is just saying that ukraine's attacks against russia's border region with the u.s.-made missiles is a signal that they seek escalation. i guess the united states, they say, is seeking escalation. he said that putin has issued his warnings already, and he hopes the new nuclear doctrine will be "well read" just amping up the concerns around this situation. we've been in the red all morning long. this -- it was a situation where we were down by over 200 points earlier this morning on news bloomberg report saying this had happened. we heard more confirmations and now you are hearing from russia officially on some of these issues.

that's why we have seen it lower. let's take a look at the treasury market, because treasury yields, which had been climbing significantly for months at this point, have taken a turn lower, as well. the u.s. ten-year sitting at 4.33. we were up in the 4.48 range yesterday. this came as we've been watching these moves higher. that can be sewn as a flight to safety with some of the issues that have come in. you're flipping through some of these other boards quickly at this point. but if you saw big, it's relatively flat, till above 91,000 at this point. but these are all moves that will be watched closely today, not only what russia is saying but the u.s. response. that will be something we'll be tracking throughout the morning. you can see this playing out in some of the futures markets and beyond with some of these issues. we are looking, again, at the

dow futures down by over 500 points. nasdaq futures 200 points lower, the s&p 500 down by 55. that's probably a decline of just over 1% for the dow, which is at 43,000, so earlier this morning, it was just over a half percent. we'll continue to monitor. >> 500, that's the landmark. we hope we see you right back tomorrow. time now for "squawk on the street." ♪ ♪ good tuesday morning. welcome to "squawk on the street." there is some flight to safety this morning on these renewed russia/ukraine tensions. gold is higher, yields are lower, futures drowning out some of walmart's beaten raise.