Fortt Knox

Days ago California lawmakers passed a bill, AB5, that would force more companies to treat more workers as employees, not contractors. What’s the big deal? 

The gig economy. Whether it’s Uber and Lyft, or Postmates and Doordash, or TaskRabbit and Instacart, a slew of companies have grown up in the smartphone era with a radical idea. When just about everyone has a smartphone and a credit card, you can assemble a workforce on a moment’s notice, pay workers electronically, and let them be independent contractors. They can work as much or as little as they want! 

But just because employers can do this doesn’t mean they should. And that’s what we’re going to debate today.  

With me this week: Two professionals who have driven for Uber and Lyft and have different opinions about what should happen here.  

Karim Bayumi is out of LA. He says drivers like him – he’s driven 5 to 6 days a week for the platforms – deserve the protections of employee status, and the companies can’t be trusted to provide that without a law.  

Harry Campbell is a former part-time Uber and Lyft driver who’s known as the Rideshare Guy. He’s got a blog that focuses on the driver community, a YouTube channel, a podcast – and he says forcing companies to treat drivers as employees is the wrong way to go.

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Apple's iPhone extravaganza is still the biggest product event of the year for a simple reason: The iPhone remains the single most successful hardware product of the PC era. We can talk about whether sales are growing or not, whether Apple is innovating or not. But Apple still sells more premium phones every year than anyone else.   So what happened this week? Three new iPhones announced, the iPhone 11, 11 Pro and Pro Max. A new Apple Watch with a screen that doesn't turn off. A new entry-level iPad. And two services at $4.99 a month, Apple Arcade and Apple TV Plus.  What does all of this mean? Should you pay $300 more for three cameras on the back instead of two? Does the watch update matter? And can Apple out-HBO HBO?  With me this week: A great lineup of people who know their stuff. Walt Mossberg, the godfather of tech reviews, is going to talk big picture from DC. Tech analyst extraordinaire Pat Moorhead and tech strategist Shelly Palmer are going to sift through and tell us which they think are the most significant. And then CNBC's own Julia Boorstin is going to join us from LA to give the view from Hollywood Apple's subscription moves. 

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The National Football League was on the brink last year. Not of death – let’s not talk crazy, now – but of the type of loss of relevance that has humbled baseball and boxing over the past generation or so.   

But now as the NFL's 100th season kicks off this week, there's a sense of fresh energy. And I would argue that if football's going to make a full comeback, technology is going to have to play a big role. 

First, a word about where we've been. Football was the undisputed champ of the major sports leagues, popularity-wise. But between critical tweets from President Trump, fans angry about players kneeling during the anthem, fans angry that Colin Kaepernick doesn't have a job after kneeling, concerns about player concussions and safety, the spotlight was withering.  

Now things appear to be turning. The NFL struck a deal with Jay-Z's Roc Nation to promote music and merchandise that will benefit social justice causes, possibly addressing the move for player activism. The owners and players are already at the table for collective bargaining, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones told CNBC this week, in hopes of presenting a strong case to both broadcast and streaming partners. ESports is gaining in popularity, potentially boosting the brand of the real game. And legal sports betting, enabled by smartphones, has some fans paying closer attention than ever. 

With me this week: CNBC's sports guy, Eric Chemi.

Also on this week's podcast:

How to say this: Rapper Jim Jones is known to his fans as an avid smoker of marijuana. It's so much a part of his brand that he's hoping to leverage that reputation into a business. His business associate Alex Todd, a jeweler with celebrity clientele, has launched a cannabis brand called Saucey Farms and Extracts. And Jones has a line within Saucey called CAPO.

I talked to both of them about how a hobby is turning into a business.

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Summer’s coming to a close, and that means the streaming wars are about to get a lot more real. Apple released a trailer for The Morning Show, one of the big series slated to hit its Apple TV Plus service this fall. Disney just gave us more details behind its slate of shows for the Disney Plus service that launches in November; and Disney and Sony get a movie divorce … and Sony gets custody of Spider-Man.  

And later on the 1-on-1: Peter Reinhardt is the CEO of Segment, a startup that helps companies make sense of customer data. The company has raised more than $280 million and is worth more than $1 billion, but the path hasn't always been smooth.

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15 years ago this week, Google had its IPO. Initial Public Offering. That means shares of its stock were available to buy for the first time. I was working as a tech reporter in Silicon Valley at the time and remember it was a big deal for a couple of reasons. One, Google’s IPO was a glimmer of hope after the dotcom bust. Two, Google was trying to reinvent the IPO by making it more transparent. They used a process called a Dutch Auction.   Today the IPO hasn’t changed for the most part. But maybe it’s about to. Prominent venture capitalist Michael Mortiz of Sequoia Capital wrote an op-Ed this week arguing that Slack and Spotify are leading the way to a better day where Wall Street fat cats won’t control and mystify the process of going public. But what would that mean for mom-and-pop investors? What would it mean for startup employees looking to make good?  This week to talk the future of the IPO I’ve got Mr. IPO, Jay Ritter, University of Florida Cordell Professor of Finance. Also joining me later on here at the Nasdaq I’ve got Kevin Delaney, Quartz Editor in Chief; and from San Francisco, Connie Loizos, TechCrunch Silicon Valley Editor and my former colleague at a certain newspaper in Silicon Valley.  

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I’ve got a business idea. I’m going to take out loans to rent a bunch of apartments around the world. Two-year leases. Then I’m going to decorate them with a super-cool modern vibe … snacks, premium soaps, entertainment spaces… and Airbnb them by the week and half week to vacationers and business travelers for less than they’d pay for a hotel room.  

But wait, you say. You’re signing up for two-year leases and only getting commitments in the days and weeks. What if the economy goes bad? What if your landlords raise the rent? What if you try to grow too fast, and your loan payments go up? 

Funny you should ask. WeWork’s parent company just filed for an IPO this week, and WeWork’s business model sounds a lot like the one I just described, only it’s office space, not apartments. Is it a good bet? 

We’re gonna talk WeWork, we’re gonna talk Viacom/CBS, Disney/Fox, Yahoo/Tumblr, Twitch/Mixr – all kinds of things that come in twos.

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Let's talk money. Apple, the tech giant, the iPhone maker, this week launched … a credit card. That's right, Apple Card, linked to Apple Pay. Apple's pitch with the card? It starts with cash and goes deep with security and design. 

This week we're going to take a closer look at the card and the app … which I have seen up close. And we're going to compare it to the deals and features you can get elsewhere. Is it really a good deal?  

With me this week: Sara Rathner from NerdWallet – a site that studies these kinds of things – and joining us a bit later, CNBC's Dierdre Bosa.

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The problem with the Monopoly board game is that only one person ends up happy in the last half hour of the game, and everyone else is miserable. 

If you believe tech critics, some of the biggest companies in the industry have figured out a way around this unhappy ending in real life: Each one of these multi-billion-dollar juggernauts has its own mini-monopoly. Google gets to rule search engines, Facebook gets social networks, Amazon gets e-commerce and Apple gets expensive phones … made by Apple … or something. I really don't get any of the arguments that Apple has a monopoly on anything. 

Why does this matter?  

One could argue – and I know this because I'm about to – that the tech companies that are in the antitrust crosshairs are more central to our everyday lives than any group of accused monopolists in history. This isn't a bunch of railroads or oil companies. This is the app you use all day to talk to your friends and family. The phone you use to fire up that app. The service you use to search for the theme gift for a 10-year wedding anniversary, and the store you use to buy the gift. 

If these companies are found to be monopolists ... and they're found to be abusing their monopoly power … they could get broken up or otherwise restricted. 

Should that happen? We're going to help you decide. With me today to figure it out, some legal firepower: 

Doug Melamed is a professor at Stanford Law School and before that was general counsel at Intel. A couple of decades ago he served at the U.S. Department of Justice as Acting Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Antitrust Division. 

Dina Srinivasan is an antitrust Scholar and an author of the paper: “The Antitrust Case Against Facebook.”

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Five billion dollars. That’s how much Facebook will have to fork over to the government under a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission. It’s the biggest fine for violating user privacy by a wide margin – 200 times bigger than the previous record, according to the FTC chair.  

If I got hit with a 5 billion dollar speeding ticket, it would hurt. I’m not going to lie. But some are already saying the settlement doesn’t go far enough.  

So. After this settlement, can Facebook say it has paid its debt to society? Or did Zuckerberg and company just make out like bandits? 

And: What does this say about privacy regulators’ ability to effectively walk the beat in Silicon Valley?

With me this week to shake me out of my vacation-induced stupor: Farhad Manjoo of the New York Times.

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Here’s the thing: It’s really hard to put a dollar value on the data that you or I deliver to internet platforms. What’s the value of a tweet? A Facebook profile that tells my birthday and links to my closest relatives?  

It’s even hard to put a value on the data the platforms have on all of us. Sure, it’s probably worth billions of dollars. But how many billions? Does the value of data go up over time like a house, or down over time, like a car? 

Our first topic is the value of data, because Democratic Senator Mark Warner and Republican Senator Josh Hawley want to require big tech companies to report the value of our data, like an asset, and would instruct the Securities and Exchange Commission to come up with a formula for calculating how much the data is worth.  

Joining me to discuss that and a lot more: CNBC’s own Josh Lipton.  

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