Energy Prices, Teen Sports Betting, & A Meaningful Life 4/2/26

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0:47Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com slash marketupdatepodcast or find Schwab Market Update wherever you get your podcasts. Bring in show music, please. Hi, I'm CNBC producer Katie Kramer. Today on Squawk Pod. Oil prices soar as the president's speech on Iran stokes fears. If the market is looking for a quick answer, they didn't get it last night from that speech. Gold down and silver down and Bitcoin down. Yeah. Is there further escalation to come? Eurasia Group's Farad Maksad. This war will go on for at least another two to three weeks. perhaps a bit longer to achieve its mission.

1:27I'm watching the military deployments much closer than I'm actually watching and indexing around what the president is saying. And asking the small questions like, what's life's meaning? Happiness expert and professor Arthur Brooks joins us. There's no creature in the universe that we know of besides Homo sapiens that has ever asked a single question. We think that we'll have agentic AI that would be like humans because it'll be able to answer any question. Answering questions is not human. asking questions as human. Plus, from the earth to the moon and teens and sports betting, a report from a unique personal finance class.

2:03It is Thursday, April 2nd, 2026. Squawk Pod begins right now. Stand Becky by in three, two, one. Cue it, please. Today's the second, second day of the second quarter. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Squawk Box right here on CNBC. We are live from the Nasdaq market site in Times Square. I'm Becky Quick, along with Joe Kernan. Andrew's out. It's April 2nd, and I know that because it's my mother's birthday. Happy birthday. Yes, happy birthday to your mother as well. There you go. And I think Morgan said it best. Thank you to all of us for being here. Which is true. Including us. President Trump says the U.S.

2:40is getting close to meeting its objectives in the Iran war. In an address to the nation, the president said that the U.S. will strike Iran hard over the next two to three weeks. He also said talks are ongoing, but if they don't lead anywhere, the U.S. is going to hit Iran's electric plants and possibly its oil infrastructure. Here was his message to countries that depend on energy shipments that go through the Strait of Hormuz, which has essentially been closed since the war began. Build up some delayed courage. Should have done it before. Should have done it with us as we asked. go to the strait and just take it, protect it, use it for yourselves.

3:21Iran has been essentially decimated. The hard part is done, so it should be easy. And the president went on to say that when the Middle East conflict is over, the Strait of Hormuz will, in his words, open up naturally. Still, okay. We're going to go for the uranium? I don't know. Are we going to do anything with CARG? I don't know. Are we going to bomb the heck out of the electric plants, which their economy is already, well, their economy, can you imagine if you did that, there's no electricity? It's all these things put pressure on the regime, I guess, but with oil up six, whatever it is today, it's up quite a bit.

4:05But it just looks like things aren't necessarily decelerating, which we thought, you know, we get some days we think we're decelerating. Other days it looks like we're. Well, yesterday during the session, it looked like someone in Iran had asked to negotiate. The president said as soon as you open the Strait of Hormuz, we'll negotiate. Yesterday, last night at nine o 'clock, I stayed up to watch it because I wanted to hear what they had to say. Thank you for being here. Thank us for being here. Right. Just to listen to his points on it. On the one hand, he said this is put it in context. This is a very short incursion, a very short war.

4:42He went back to World War One, went back to World War Two, World War One, one year and change. World War Two, three years, talked about Vietnam War, 18 years. So this is not going to be one of those types of situations, basically, he was saying. Then he said prices are higher at the pump, but this is going to be temporary. Basically, suck it up and deal with what you're going to be looking at. Said we're still ahead of schedule, but then he said we still have more to do, and we're going to do that over the next two to three weeks. I think we're in week five now, so that would get you to seven or eight weeks.

5:10How do you like that spread there? Really tightened up again, right? 107.64 to 108, basically the same. 4 to 7, 50 cents. Right, which is really unusual. There's typically been a$6 to$7 spread between the two. This impacts Brent more than it impacts WTI. It's a global price, though, and we're finding that out. We can produce as much as we want here. I mean, the oil companies are like, wow, oil is awful high. We feel bad. We're not going to drill more because it's so erratic. We can't count on this being the oil price either. But it's certainly going to be some product. This is where windfall profits.

5:47You're going to see people wanting to do that again. Potentially. Well, look at big oil stocks. Chevron up another two and three quarters percent. Chevron, by the way, was the best performer in the Dow over the last quarter. Perfect for them. They're not doing it. It's not their fault, but they're not giving it back. Well, the other issue you have is the shortfall also comes when you're looking at refined product, right? Jet fuel in particular is going to start being hard to find. The airlines have acknowledged that as well. But we continue to watch this on a day-by-day basis. And if the market is looking for a quick answer, they didn't get it last night from that speech.

6:20And, you know, gold down and silver down and Bitcoin down. Yeah. Things don't always move the way you anticipate or might expect. Four astronauts blasting off from Cape Canaveral on the first mission to the moon in more than 50 years. Three, two, one, booster ignition and lift off. The Artemis 2 mission launching just after 630 Eastern time last night. It's a 10-day trip, long way, to the moon and back. It's designed to set the stage for a landing in two years on the southern part, southern pole where it's light all the time. The crew of three Americans and one Canadian will test NASA's new Orion capsule around Earth for about the first day of the mission, and then they're going to fire their main engine for the trip to the moon if all goes as planned.

7:16They'll get close to the lunar surface, and on Monday, that's on Monday, and begin a roughly four-day trip back. NASA plans to eventually establish a sustainable base on the moon. And I couldn't help... Years in the making. I couldn't help thinking of 2001, which your husband just loves everything about, Arthur C. Clarke and Kubrick. And I explained that the guy's headed to the moon, and he's like flying in business class. and he calls up his daughter on FaceTime, which all seemed ridiculously far-fetched. And yet here we are. And yet in 2001, when the movie came out, was a ways off, too. Yeah.

8:04But he's headed up there, and of course they find the buried... He's going up there because no one wants to talk about that monolith that they found up there, which is obviously a sign of a much higher intelligence. Then I was reading Jared Isaac, and I've had arguments with people about whether there's life. I think there's seven trillion galaxies. Each galaxy has hundreds of billions of stars, and they call it, But I forget, there's a word for what similar to Earth is in terms of temperature. Well, the ability to sustain life. Sustain this kind of life. Water. And then the question is, do you need water?

8:51Water. And you figure, would it be based on hydrocarbons like we are, probably? Or carbohydrates or whatever. But it's got to be abundant. It's just so hard to get anywhere because the distances are so vast. And you can't go faster than the speed of light, theoretically, unless you go through, I don't know, black hole. like wormholes. Several major sports events are happening this weekend, including the NCAA women's and men's final four. Meantime, though, a growing number of teens are playing another high stakes game off of the court. And experts say that makes financial education a greater priority.

9:28Sharon Epperson joins us right now with more. And Sharon, this is certainly a problem that a lot of parents are thinking about. Absolutely. A lot of parents are thinking about it. And, And, you know, as we look at this April Financial Literacy Month, it becomes an even greater issue. I had the opportunity to visit AECI, one charter school in the Bronx this week. And like many high schools nationwide, students here say there's more talk about sports betting than budgeting or stocks. In this personal finance class, the teacher is playing offense. So would it be a good idea to bet if you have only a 4 percent chance of winning?

10:03Making sure his students understand what's at risk with gambling and sports betting. When it comes to stocks, you can accumulate your money over the years. It's not as risky. A survey of high school teachers from around the country found 83 percent reported observing or hearing of students participating in sports betting or online gambling. FanDue and MGM Sportsbook. Wow. Sports betting has grown rapidly since 2018 and is now legal in a majority of states. Yet less than a handful of states have adopted academic standards for how to teach the risks and consequences of gambling. Red, how are you feeling right now?

10:46I just lost everything. You just lost everything. And if we're not teaching about this to our students, to our most vulnerable students, when are you going to teach it to them, even though they're losing? They're like, this is fun. and to try to get across that gamification of gambling is a very difficult thing to do because they're just looking at it as entertainment. They're not looking at the long-term effects of it. Red. Oh, you see? So now you won your points. Yep. Personal finance teacher Brian Zahofsky says he believes understanding the long-term financial impact of gambling will increase the odds of student success in the future.

11:23April is Financial Literacy Month, and it's a good time to sign up for my Money 101 newsletter. Share it with others, too, and also look for more on the impact of sports betting on teens and adults' financial health in a special edition coming up. I love that. I love how that teacher is going at it. Like, here are the odds. Here is the math. This is why this doesn't make sense. This is why you should be putting it long term in the markets over time. We just have Warren Buffett on this week, and he was telling us that when he got married, when he was 21 or something, and went to, they went to Vegas.

11:56They drove through Vegas on their honeymoon when they drove out west. And he looked around and saw well-dressed people who were making really stupid bets by putting on all of this. And he thought, we're going to get really rich just by looking at the money people are willing to throw away. Absolutely. You know, the majority, about two-thirds of adults who are over 21 admit that they started betting or placed their first bet under the age of 21. And, of course, the numbers are even higher for those who are already in their early 20s, 30s. So we're seeing an increase of people doing this. And so it's important to have it be part of the curriculum in personal finance classes.

12:33But there are very few states that have incorporated that into any type of academic status. You've got to take it head on. This is where things are moving. How active are teens when it comes to the prediction markets, when it comes to sports gambling? Well, when you look at the fact that at 18 or 20, you know, you may not be able to legal. There's not legal betting that you can do, but a lot of the parents, but a lot of the exactly through their parents and a lot of the prediction markets will allow you to bet, you know, at 18 and up. So we talked to one student who's a senior in a school outside of Nashville, and he said he was watching on YouTube, watched this guy predict on how many points a player was going to make and made$5 ,000.

13:11He's like, that's free money. So he decided for his 18th birthday to take the money that he'd gotten and start betting. And he lost so much. He never saw those big wins that he thought were going to materialize. And he's like, I could get addicted to this, though. And that's another thing that we're seeing, that even the addiction to gambling is greater or more serious, a lot of people have said and surveys have shown, than alcohol or drug addiction. If you're trying to bet to actually make money to use or to have fun with, that's the wrong way to do it. But that's how some of these teenagers are.

13:47That's what I mean. Do you want that immediate gratification? I made a bet yesterday. Four-way parlay on baseball games. Ten bucks. Five dollars. $5. But guess what I would have made? And three of my teams won. And the Phillies came back in the bottom of the ninth to beat the Nationals. Otherwise, I would have won$128 on$5. Now, that put me kind of in a bad mood. But I don't need the$128, and I don't need the$5. It was all about watching nervously when the Nationals blew this lead. And I was on the edge of my seat watching this. But that's fun. You don't need this money. No, this is$5. Just learning how to budget.

14:30People think I have a problem. Katie Kramer, our producer, has a friend who's a teacher who talked to her students recently. And almost every boy in the class raised their hand when they said when they were looking towards their future funding, they were going to put some in retirement. But sports gambling was part of what they planned. It just makes it fun. It just makes it fun. They could name, one of the students in the class named in like two seconds, six sports betting companies. I said, okay, so now what are your six favorite stocks? Right. No, I wasn't even naming his shoe company. He wasn't naming the clothing company.

15:05But that's what he was focused on. I don't know. That's not great. That's scary. If you bought Nike at$170, it might be better to put some money on Villanova. But I'm fine. Yeah. Sharon, thank you. Sure. Cheese will be next. Coming up on Squawk Pod, finding the meaning of your life with Arthur Brooks. Well, one way to do it, don't scroll on your phone right when you wake up. The important thing for the first hour is not using it to pass the time, is not using it to just kind of anesthetize yourself. And that's what people are really doing. They're frittering away their time. And the truth is they're waiting for something.

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17:06Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com slash marketupdatepodcast or find Schwab Market Update wherever you get your podcasts.

17:18You're listening to Squawk Pod. Up and Becky, Q. Good morning, everybody. Welcome back to Squawk Box. We are live from the Nasdaq market site in Times Square. Our next guest says there's an epidemic of unhappiness, especially among young people. Joining us now, Harvard professor Arthur Brooks. He is a columnist with the Free Press, host of The Office Hours with Arthur Brooks podcast, and author of a new book out this week, the meaning of life, a finding purpose in an age of emptiness. We have you on a lot. Your job keeps getting harder and harder. Becky and I both love 1923, Taylor Sheridan. But in that, you can see society changing from where you had to spend your entire day doing things.

18:07Right. With no conveniences, even washing your clothes, nothing. And suddenly, leisure time. became a real possibility for everyone. So that led to the 50s and 60s where people were just bored. And then social media came. This is me telling you what happened. Then social media came along and just let everyone commiserate and share their misery. And here we are right now. And you're fighting an uphill battle. It's never going to work. People are just miserable because they have too much time on their hands. Isn't that it? No. Well, yes. I mean, look, there are problems for sure. But I wrote this book because the truth of the matter is that the meaning of our lives is getting harder to find.

18:46And the reason for that is very clear. It's never been better, Arthur. Well, yeah, it's been better in a lot of ways. But the truth of the matter is that we're using our brains wrong precisely because we solved the problem of boredom. You know, boredom is boring and we don't like it very much. But our brains are supposed to be bored. This is what I talk about in the science in this book. And we solved it with the devices in our pockets, which created this huge crisis of meaning. We literally started using the wrong part of our brains. And we're doing it systematically. The average American looks at his phone or her phone 205 times a day every 13 minutes, which shoves us into the part of our brain for analysis away from mystery and meaning.

19:21And so I talk an awful lot about what meaning is and how people can find it. But most importantly, it's how we can live in a brand new way. That's what this new book is about. And it's kind of an old way, as a matter of fact. But it takes work, especially for people who don't remember the before times. So shutting off your phone, essentially? Well, it's basically using protocols for phones. We're not going to get rid of our phones. We're going to have to get on the airplane and get into our bank accounts. But one of the things that I talked about is how you can improve your life dramatically by not looking at your phone for the first hour of the day, last hour before you go to bed, meal times, and you'll really change your life an awful lot.

19:55And then you can actually pay attention to some of the things that human beings are designed to be paying attention to. It's such an amazing thing. It should be additive. And it should make everything better. And you're basically pointing your finger at this thing as the root cause of a lot of our problems. Well, you know, it's funny because how we use our screens, it's a symptom of the way that our culture has changed, which is that we have to be busy all the time. Idleness is a real problem for us. But human beings are not made to be doing something all the time. Human beings are made to be thinking and mind-wandering and talking to each other.

20:31Like milking a cow and doing chores. You know, that's the other thing. There are no days off on a farm. You've got to get up at 6 a.m. every day. Grandpa Kernan didn't come home from milking the cow and say, Honey, I had a panic attack behind the cow today. No, didn't have time. Because his brain was working the way it was actually supposed to. But we can actually fix that. We can actually fix that by living in a new way. I talk about the six big ways that people need to live a little bit differently. Do you do that? Only because I'd like to say that I don't look at my phone. in the morning or right before I go to bed.

21:08But because of my job, I have to. Yeah, for sure. I get up and I check the phone immediately. Same thing. Right before I go to bed, I'm looking to make sure I'm not missing news. Right, no. Do you do it? It's really hard to unplug. Well, I'm pretty good about it, but you can't make the perfect enemy of the good. So for your job, you have to wake up and look at what's happening to markets, look at the futures, et cetera. But you don't scroll. The important thing for the first hour is not using it to pass the time, is not using it to just kind of anesthetize yourself. And that's what people are really doing.

21:36They're frittering away their time. And the truth is they're waiting for something. And that waiting for something is the sense of the meaning of their life. Effectively, a lot of young people are living in a simulation. So they get up. Their phone is next to their bed. They check the phone. They scroll the phone for a long time. Then they go to work on Zoom. And they date online. And they game. And the result is that life is kind of fake, as a matter of fact. I interviewed a lot of young people for this book. And they say, I feel like my life is empty because my life isn't real. And the answer is because we're living in the matrix is what happens.

22:08If you're online all day, you're in the matrix. That's basically the plot of that old movie, as a matter of fact. And so it's getting into real life and figuring out ways to fix your brain. There's a whole thesis about getting up at 5 a.m., doing 20 minutes of exercise, 20 minutes of mind stimulation, and 20 minutes of reflection. And a lot of people are doing it. If I'm using my phone to do, so I exercise, then can I use it to do word things like a nocturnal? That works for me to get, you know, and they're hard and I got to think and it takes me a while. Is that okay? Technology is not the enemy here.

22:44And we're actually going to figure this out. The problem is when we're anesthetizing ourselves with technology and we're using it as a substitute for human beings. That's the problem. And that's what we actually need to solve. But you're right. I mean, these protocols in the morning that I have, I get up, I exercise, I practice my religion first thing in the morning. I do all of these things every single day because I want to protect my brain. And all of us can do that in our own way. But we have to know the science. We're not able to sleep in until 5 a.m. I know. 5 a.m. is like lunchtime. It is.

23:15We had a gentleman on who is also trying to help us with happiness. He said he was a I tend to believe mechanical engineers or people that have had strict science backgrounds more than social science, because I don't even think it's science. And I'm willing to listen to him. But he threw out the whole hierarchy of of Maslow's needs, which I've always thought there was a lot of merit in that argument. And I don't know what was his basic thrust that you need to realize your life could have gone in other directions or something. that self-actualization is not the end. Well, and you can't find fulfillment by getting to that point because you're never, I forget exactly what he said, you're never going to know all of the outcomes.

23:59The truth is you won't know all the outcomes. But one of the best ways you can repair your brain is by recognizing that the right hemisphere is where we ask why questions of our lives. The left side is the how-to and what stuff that you're doing on your phone. And once you actually start asking the big questions, even though you don't have answers, This is an important thing to keep in mind. There's no creature in the universe that we know besides Homo sapiens that has ever asked a single question. We think that we'll have agentic AI that will be like humans because it will be able to answer any question.

24:29Answering questions is not human. Asking questions is human. So, of course, big mysteries, that's where you're using the brain that you're supposed to. That's what's supposed to happen when you're bored. And quiet time is basically what you're saying. Quiet time, unplug and sit and think. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, the ways to do that, it might seem silly that we actually have to have a list of tasks for people to find the meaning of their lives. But in point of fact, that's exactly what we need. And I've been testing this method for the past five years with my students at Harvard. And it really, really works.