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I should have posted this way earlier, but I've been getting questions. Here's the skinny: Fortt Knox is not dead. It's just been reborn. Instead of living in your favorite podcast app, Fortt Knox now lives on LinkedIn and YouTube.

Now you can see video of my interviews, and engage with a broader community of Fortt Knox viewers. I stream my interviews live, and the recordings are there for on-demand viewing. I also serve up curated insights from the interviews -- there's something new from Fortt Knox in my Jon Fortt LinkedIn feed just about every weekday, and pretty often on the Fortt Knox channel on YouTube, too.

Beyond that, Fortt Knox is taking on new life -- it's a weekly newsletter distributed through my profile on LinkedIn's platform. So if you don't have time to check in with me every day, you can get a weekly roundup of the latest goings on in tech, leadership and innovation, and find out what's coming next. So get on LinkedIn and subscribe, and that will be delivered right to your inbox.

Still, I know a lot of listeners will be bummed that the podcast part has gone away. You might be wondering why. It comes down to this: I want to hear from you. Interact with you. Podcasts are great as a passive medium, but they're a little too passive for where I want to take this. The new format is rich with video, and gives lots of opportunity for you to share the experience with others and interact with me.

So that's it! Look, LinkedIn isn't just for job hunting, and it's not just for self promoters and techies. It's a great platform for everyone who wants to get insight into how to do work better. And no, that's not a paid endorsement. Nobody paid me to move this to LinkedIn. It just happens to be the best platform for what I want to do with Fortt Knox. So: Thanks for being on the ride thus far, and I hope to see you on LinkedIn and YouTube.

In the late 1990s, Andy Jassy pitched a wild idea to his boss and mentor, Jeff Bezos: What if Amazon developed another business, delivering computing power and storage . 

Two decades later, it stands as Amazon’s most profitable division – one that Jassy continues to lead as CEO of Amazon Web Services. I sat down with Jassy in a broadcast exclusive at the company’s annual AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas to talk about Amazon’s lead in the cloud today, the controversy surrounding the Pentagon’s awarding of the highly sought-after JEDI contract to Microsoft (and Amazon’s lawsuit in response), the lessons learned from the company’s failed HQ2 attempt in New York City and more.

A walk to remember. Apple CEO Tim Cook and President Donald Trump in Texas this week, and it’s a high stakes photo op. They’re at the factory in Austin Texas where Apple’s Mac Pro computer is assembled.  

Cook no doubt wants to make it hard for the president to put tariffs on Mac Pro components. Cook has said unless they continue to be exempt from tariffs, he’ll have to move manufacturing completely to China. 

The president wants to push Apple and U.S. CEOs more broadly to manufacture here instead of in China.  

But I think this whole scene is a bit of a sham. I’ll tell you why. 

Joining me this week, Ina Fried, chief tech correspondent at Axios. 

We’ve got more than Trump and Cook, we’ve got Disney Plus hacking, Microsoft teaming up on Slack, and more.  

I was on the road this week, doing a little tour of California. Three cities in three days. San Francisco Monday, L.A. Tuesday, San Diego Wednesday. Adobe’s MAX conference was this week in LA, where the creative software giant unveils its latest features.  

Well, everybody’s got challengers, and one of Adobe’s is a startup called Canva. Canva has emerged to help regular folks add high-end creative flair to their presentations. Even better, it was founded by a young woman in Australia who was looking for a way to make yearbooks in the digital era. It turned into something much bigger than she envisioned. I sat down with Melanie Perkins at the New York Stock Exchange recently to talk about how how her design project turned into a profitable, venture-backed brand that’s earned praise from legendary tech watcher and investor Mary Meeker among others.  

This week, my one-on-one with the co-founder and CEO of Canva, Melanie Perkins.  

It's the biggest single cloud contract … possibly ever. Definitely the most talked about. The Pentagon's Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract. JEDI, going to: Microsoft late last week. The Empire Strikes Back. 

The JEDI contract is worth up to 10 billion dollars over 10 years, but just as valuable as the money: It's worth bragging rights and street cred. This was supposed to be Amazon's contract to lose. Amazon practically invented enterprise cloud computing 14 years ago with AWS. When the Pentagon put out the requirements for the contract a year and a half ago, some competitors cried foul that it was too tailored to Amazon. 

Is this a game changer in the cloud wars? 

With me this week, co-anchor of CNBC's Squawk Alley, Morgan Brennan. 

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in Washington this week arguing for Libra, the digital currency his company created and wants to build around. This after he last week made the case in front of an audience at Georgetown University that Facebook’s future, its past, its reason for being are all tied up in free speech.

With me this week for another bite out of this Facebook and free speech debate: John Stanton, the cofounder of the Save Journalism Project, and Farhad Manjoo, columnist for the New York Times.

Tech just can’t get away from politics.  

Senator Elizabeth Warren has a bone to pick with Facebook. Mainly its standards for political ads. After Facebook refused to take down a Trump Campaign ad that accused former vice president Joe Biden of wrongdoing connected to his son Hunter’s work in Ukraine, Warren fired back. She posted her own Facebook ad that started with a false claim that Facebook and founder Mark Zuckerberg have endorsed Trump for re-election.  

A little farther afield, Activision Blizzard is caught out in the storm of controversy around Hong Kong. Chung Ng Wai, a Hearthstone player, was removed from a tournament, denied prize money and banned for a year for saying in a post-game interview, “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our age!” ATVI has since softened a little, saying they’ll let him have his 10,000 dollars prize money and ban him for just six months.  

With me this week to talk free speech and more: from LA, Mike Jackson is CEO and principal at Motus One and founder of 2050 Marketing. Here in New York, Nilay Patel is editor in chief of The Verge.  

It’s hard to save money these days – and I’m not talking about the new phones and earbuds that come out this time of year and tempt you to spend. Interest rates are really low. Which is great if you’re borrowing to buy a house or a car, but not so awesome if you want to save. The interest rate for the typical U.S. savings account is 9 hundredths of a percent.  

But! All is not lost. For a long time there have been higher rates for savers, even from mainstream banks. Now a young and scrappy group of tech startups are pushing the boundaries further with interest rates at about 2% – that’s 20 times higher than average. It’s the difference between earning 16 bucks a month on 10 thousand dollars in savings, or earning just 75 cents.  

That’s just the beginning. There are cheaper ways to trade stocks, ways to make money off of credit cards. Today we’re going to help you put a plan together.  

With me this week, CNBC’s personal finance expert Sharon Epperson. And Kenneth Lin, CEO of Credit Karma, which has just announced it’s launching one of these high-yield savings accounts. Later, Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman.

It’s hard to save money these days – and I’m not talking about the new phones and earbuds that come out this time of year and tempt you to spend. Interest rates are really low. Which is great if you’re borrowing to buy a house or a car, but not so awesome if you want to save. The interest rate for the typical U.S. savings account is 9 hundredths of a percent.  

But! All is not lost. For a long time there have been higher rates for savers, even from mainstream banks. Now a young and scrappy group of tech startups are pushing the boundaries further with interest rates at about 2% – that’s 20 times higher than average. It’s the difference between earning 16 bucks a month on 10 thousand dollars in savings, or earning just 75 cents.  

That’s just the beginning. There are cheaper ways to trade stocks, ways to make money off of credit cards. Today we’re going to help you put a plan together.  

With me this week, CNBC’s personal finance expert Sharon Epperson. And Kenneth Lin, CEO of Credit Karma, which has just announced it’s launching one of these high-yield savings accounts. Later, Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman.

We’ve got a blockbuster hardware announcement this week … from Microsoft. The biggest hardware risk the company has taken since Xbox. Surface Neo, two screens with a hinge in between, coming next year. And there’s more. Surface Pro X, arguably the first ARM-based computer to run full Windows 10. 

Has Microsoft changed the game here? Or are these cool gadgets that won’t really sell? 

With me this week, one of my favorite guys to talk hardware, Pat Moorhead of Moor Insights and Strategies. Let’s talk Microsoft vs. the rest of the field and then hit some other headlines in consumer electronics.

We’ve got a blockbuster hardware announcement this week … from Microsoft. The biggest hardware risk the company has taken since Xbox. Surface Neo, two screens with a hinge in between, coming next year. And there’s more. Surface Pro X, arguably the first ARM-based computer to run full Windows 10. 

Has Microsoft changed the game here? Or are these cool gadgets that won’t really sell? 

With me this week, one of my favorite guys to talk hardware, Pat Moorhead of Moor Insights and Strategies. Let’s talk Microsoft vs. the rest of the field and then hit some other headlines in consumer electronics.

WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann resigned from the CEO role this week, in the face of skepticism about the coworking startup’s plans to go public. There are questions about the business model – we’ve addressed some of those here on Fortt Knox. There are questions about his eccentric leadership style. And there are questions about the way he’s maintained control of the company while taking lots of money out of it.  

WeWork is in the headlines this week, but we’ve lived through versions of this story before. Uber’s board of directors pushed co-founder Travis Kalanick out of the CEO role to get the IPO done. The Google founders brought in Eric Schmidt early on as CEO to act as adult supervision. The biggie: Apple cofounder Steve Jobs was effectively forced out of Apple in the ‘80s only to come back a decade later to save the company.  

We love founders. Their stories and personalities live at the heart of companies. But sometimes they’ve got to go. When? When is firing a founder a mistake? 

With me this week, tech chronicler Steven Levy of Wired magazine, who has covered big companies, big ideas, big personalities – his most recent book was about Google. Also with me, Walter Isaacson, biographer of great founders and inventors including Steve Jobs, Ben Franklin, Albert Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci.  

WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann resigned from the CEO role this week, in the face of skepticism about the coworking startup’s plans to go public. There are questions about the business model – we’ve addressed some of those here on Fortt Knox. There are questions about his eccentric leadership style. And there are questions about the way he’s maintained control of the company while taking lots of money out of it.  

WeWork is in the headlines this week, but we’ve lived through versions of this story before. Uber’s board of directors pushed co-founder Travis Kalanick out of the CEO role to get the IPO done. The Google founders brought in Eric Schmidt early on as CEO to act as adult supervision. The biggie: Apple cofounder Steve Jobs was effectively forced out of Apple in the ‘80s only to come back a decade later to save the company.  

We love founders. Their stories and personalities live at the heart of companies. But sometimes they’ve got to go. When? When is firing a founder a mistake? 

With me this week, tech chronicler Steven Levy of Wired magazine, who has covered big companies, big ideas, big personalities – his most recent book was about Google. Also with me, Walter Isaacson, biographer of great founders and inventors including Steve Jobs, Ben Franklin, Albert Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci.  

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

Fifteen 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.  

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.  

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 travellers 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.  

Julie Sweet today leads the North American business at Accenture, a global consulting giant. Years ago, she was a high school sophomore with the gift of gab, entering various debate and speech competitions for the prize money, building her own scholarship fund. She wasn't doing it for kicks; at times growing up in Southern California she had just one pair of shoes, or one pair of pants that fit. Her father painted cars for a living, and her mother was a hairdresser.   

One particular contest at the Lions Club had come down to a final showdown between Julie and another girl. Julie lost. Stung by the injustice of it – she felt her speech had been better – she griped to her father on the way home.   

— 

To say Tom Siebel has had an interesting life would be putting it mildly. He’s a billionaire entrepreneur, a tech visionary, and the survivor of an elephant attack eight years ago that, by the odds, should have killed him.   

Several doctors told him he would never walk again, much less sail competitively. But he does.  

So what do you learn about life when you’ve stared down death in the form of a five-ton elephant, been crushed by that elephant, and lived to tell the tale?   

What do you learn when you’ve invented one of the first killer workplace apps of the PC era, and sold it for about 6 billion dollars?  

— 

When he was 14 years old growing up in West Philadelphia, Troy Carter started promoting parties at a neighbor's house and charging for entry. He did the DJing himself to save money.  

Today he's one of the most respected visionaries at the intersection of two industries: Music and tech.   

Carter wears a lot of hats. He's been a manager, working with the likes of John Legend, Lady Gaga and Meghan Trainor. He's an investor, a general partner at venture capital firm Cross Culture Ventures. And he's a connector.  

Amazon has three people who hold the title of CEO. There's Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO. Then there are two deputies: Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon Web Services, the cloud business. And Jeff Wilke, CEO of global consumer. 

Jeff Wilke got the title CEO of global consumer three years ago, and hadn't done a broadcast interview since – until this week, when he sat down with me for CNBC. Wilke's been with Amazon for 20 years, and now runs the core business of e-commerce and physical retail. The massive global logistics operation, the billions of items shipped – all that reports up to him. 

I talked to Jeff Wilke in Las Vegas at Amazon's first re:MARS event; MARS stands for machine learning, automation, robotics and space. Later on in his keynote, Wilke gave an update on Amazon's plan to deliver packages by drone. He didn't spill the beans on that plan in this interview, but he does talk about Amazon's ambition to keep delivering Prime packages faster and faster – in even less than a day. 

We’re past Memorial Day, and that means two things: barbecue season, and software season.   

Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, WWDC, kicks off Monday. It’s an event where Apple gathers engineers from everywhere to announce its vision for the future of software, and to answer their questions about how to make today’s apps work better. 

Who cares? Well, if you use an iPhone, iPad, Mac, you’re probably getting new software, even if you don’t buy a new device. And if you’re a tech watcher, you get some hints about what’s coming in the next generations of iPhones and iPads.  

Joining me to talk Apple, tech labor and more, I’ve got the father of tech reviews, a pioneer in tech journalism, Walt Mossberg.

Ever get so mad in an argument that you forget what it’s about? Just so focused on the other person being wrong that you forget what your point was in the first place? 

A couple of developments in tech this week bring exactly that to mind. The Trump Administration’s blacklisting of Huawei and the outcry over FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s blessing for the marriage of T-Mobile and Sprint.  

Huawei is China’s biggest tech player, kind of like what Samsung is in South Korea. Huawei makes phones, they make networking equipment. The Trump Administration says they also make a security risk for U.S. 5G networks. Huawei’s leadership is too close to the Chinese government, they say, and so no U.S. companies should buy their equipment or otherwise do business with them. I say that’s a flawed security strategy and we’re going to talk about why.  

Joining me to do exactly that: Kevin Delaney, Editor in Chief at Quartz.  

You ever hear about kids taking a gap year after high school? A gap year. It's when they don't go straight to college and don't get a job, they … do something else. Maybe travel to Europe, or hike the Appalachian Trail. Gap years cost money, so mostly rich kids do them. For other people they’re called “being unemployed,” or “vagrancy.” 

But! For kids whose parents can afford it? A gap year can be a beautiful period of self-discovery. Or it can be a ticket to delay responsibility.  

What does this have to do with tech? Uber just went public days ago, after waiting a long time. Which is kind of like finally starting college after that gap year. How did the stock do? Terrible. Like straight Fs. Priced at the low end of the range, trading 10 percent below that.  

I blame the parents. SoftBank and its 100-billion-dollar Vision Fund have been slinging billions of dollars around Silicon Valley like gap years after Andover, helping startups delay their IPOs. The question today? Is SoftBank spoiling the kids? 

Uber had an action-packed IPO that did NOT go the way a lot of people expected. And in the lead-up to that, I got a visit from one of the smartest guys in the world in the field of computer vision – which is an important facet of driverless cars. This week on Fortt Knox, Ina Fried of Axios joins me to talk Uber, and Amnon Shashua of Mobileye tells how he went from college professor to billionaire entrepreneur … who is still a college professor. 

Is Endgame just the beginning? Disney has its eyes on the prize in the streaming wars, and now that it’s clocked the biggest movie opening ever – by a mile – all the pieces might be falling into place.   

I now consider myself to be something of an Avengers Endgame expert. I saw it in Orlando on vacation Friday, then got stranded in Vegas for work Monday and saw it again. Don’t ask.  

And basically Disney couldn’t ask for a better setup for the launch of its streaming strategy this fall. This year it’s closing out two of the top-grossing movie franchises of all time: Avengers and the Star Wars Skywalker saga. This as some of the biggest names in tech, including Apple, Google and Amazon, are also suiting up to do battle in streaming.

Also: I sat down with VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger to talk about innovation, tech's impact on society, and the challenges of being a person of faith while leading a Silicon Valley company.

I grew up in Washington, DC in the ‘80s. And 4 out of 5 playground fights ended before they started. Oh, there was plenty of trash talk – name calling, threats, even pushing. But when it was time to throw down? Most kids didn’t really want that busted lip.  

This week we saw that same story play out in the multi-billion-dollar world of tech. Apple was gonna teach Qualcomm a lesson. Qualcomm wasn’t scared. Yesterday, minutes into their high-stakes court battle, the giants settled.  

With me to break down the most important stuff happening in tech: Casey Newton of The Verge.  

John Rogers, Jr. Is Chairman and CEO of Ariel Investments. It has $13 billion under management. It's the largest black-owned investment firm in the country, and he's been running it more than 35 years.  

This week, my conversation with John. We talk about a lot of stuff, including why he likes to eat one meal a day at McDonald’s, and how he once beat Michael Jordan playing basketball, 1-on-1. Seriously. It’s on YouTube.  

This week I spent some time talking to Ginni Rometty, the chairman and CEO of IBM.  

I've been wanting to do a CNBC and Fortt Knox interview with Ginni for years now, and this year, it finally all came together. As a matter of fact, she and I have been making up for lost time. She's been kind enough to sit down with me three times: in January after her keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, in February at IBM's Think conference in San Francisco, and this week at CNBC's first Future of Work event of the year in New York. We've got a rhythm going. 

After our on-stage interview tackling artificial intelligence, workforce training and more, she joined me for a dive into how IBM is addressing those challenges specifically, and how the themes of technology shifts, equity and discomfort fit her own journey.  

This is a quick talk by Fortt Knox standards – but it's packed. Ginni doesn't waste words. Still, she left me wanting more, and I'll wager you'll feel the same. I can guarantee I'll try to get her to spend some time with me on Fortt Knox again. 

Apple TV Plus. Apple News Plus. Apple Arcade. Apple Card. We still don’t have all the details, like pricing and mechanics, but Apple CEO Tim Cook hosted Hollywood royalty at the company’s Cupertino headquarters this week. The promise: a new model for digital commerce and digital content that emphasizes privacy over targeting and subscriptions over ads.  

But is Apple too late? And for publishers and producers who have been burned by the big platforms before, is this time different? 

Joining me to dig for answers, Kevin Delaney, editor-in-chief and co-CEO at Quartz; Stephanie Mehta, editor of Fast Company; and Rebekah Saltsman, CEO of Finji, the game studio behind Overland.

Twenty-five years ago today I was probably really stressed out about the college application and admissions process.  

Things have arguably gotten tougher since then for students trying to chart their futures. And the headlines this month don’t help.   

The U.S. Department of Justice charged 50 people last week in a multi-million-dollar scheme that allowed rich parents to cheat the college admissions system. By faking standardized test scores and bribing athletics officials, those parents managed to get their kids into elite schools like Georgetown, Stanford, Yale, and USC. 

But what if you don’t want to commit a crime but still want to succeed in life? What’s the plan? We’re going to discuss.  

With me this week: Michael Reilly, executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers; C.J. Farley, author of the new book Around Harvard Square, and the father of two teenagers; Adam Brownlee, an investment theory instructor at Western Kentucky University who has done the math on whether an Ivy League degree is worth the cost; and CNBC wealth editor Robert Frank.  

Also on the podcast: Frank Calderoni is the CEO of software company Anaplan, and he’s the former CFO of companies including Cisco, Red Hat and SanDisk.  

Have tech companies gotten so big that it’s bad for the economy? Senator Elizabeth Warren says so. She’s proposing to break up not one, but several tech giants, including Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. She says they shouldn’t be allowed to both run distributor platforms and compete on them. It’s like being an umpire and a team owner at the same time.  

Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek not calling for a breakup, but he is calling for an overhaul – specifically when it comes to Apple. He’s pointing to the same issue Warren is: Apple is charging Spotify to operate on its App Store, but then also competing with Spotify in the same store.  

So. Is there a problem here? Should big tech be broken up? If not, should regulators step in to change the rules? 

This week I’m joined by Wired senior writer Lauren Goode; and here with me, New York Times Tech columnist Kevin Roose.  

Joining us in just a bit, former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, Author of new book: “From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future” 

Later on the podcast: Dominique Morisseau is a playwright, a MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, and her musical “Ain’t Too Proud — The Life and Times of the Temptations” opens on Broadway this Thursday. A unique innovator shares her journey and you don’t want to miss it.

You’ve probably heard of Fortnite. It’s a game and more than a game – a cultural moment that’s swept in with all the force of Pokémon Go, and arguably more of the staying power. There’s the game itself, but there are the dances, the addictions.  

Now, here’s a twist: Fortnite has competition. Electronic Arts a month ago dropped Apex Legends, its own free-to-play multiplayer team combat game, and it MIGHT be hotter than Fortnite. It has grown as much in a month as Fortnite did in four. Fortnite’s developer is already copying features.  

So. What makes this style of game so different from what came before? How big is the money involved? And how does it fit into the future of eSports?

Plus:

Gary Smith grew up in Birmingham, then the industrial heart of the United Kingdom. Both of his parents worked in factories. For career day, the high school took the kids to a coal mine and a steelworks. Smith wasn't inspired. 

Smith is now the CEO of Ciena, a networking company with a market value over $6 billion. But at the time, he didn't reject a future in mining because of high-tech dreams. In a recent conversation, Smith told me that after high school, he moved to London to pursue a dream of becoming a photographer; he took commercial photos of buildings, and also shot weddings and other events.  

Only by wading into the job market and trying to make it did he discover technology, and figure out what skills he would need. 

There’s little question that technology – software – is shaping the future of our work, our play, and even how we form opinions. But who is shaping that technology? 

It’s been quite an economic run. The stock market’s been climbing for a decade, and in that time, tech companies like Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook have gone from underdogs to overlords. Even as that’s happened, employees and observers have settled on a nagging question: Is there room for more women and minorities on the campuses and in the startups where this future is crafted?  

With me in New York this week, Anu Duggal, founding partner at Female Founders Fund. Joining me from Atlanta, Kathryn Finney, founder and managing director at Digital Undivided, which encourages entrepreneurship among black and Latina women. And from San Francisco, Ruben Harris is CEO of Career Karma, host of the Breaking Into Startups podcast.

So long, New York! Amazon has pulled out of its commitment to build a massive campus and bring 25,000 to 40,000 high-paying jobs to Long Island City in Queens. On Valentines Day! 

Roses are red / violets are blue / you’re not getting / my HQ2 – Love, Jeff 

What went wrong? Why the breakup?  

First of all, some critics were mad that New York offered 3 billion dollars in tax incentives to lure Amazon in the first place. Most businesses just come here because they want to be in New York and pay the taxes.  

Second, you’ve got the union issues. Amazon flat out said, we’re not going to want our employees to unionize. 

But still. It wasn’t as if the working class in Queens was rising up in protest against the Amazon deal. A poll by the Siena College Research Institute found 56 percent of New Yorkers wanted it, Democrats and Independents more than Republicans. Blacks and Latinos favored the deal more than any other group.  

So what gives? And what does it mean for future deals between billionaire-run corporations and cities?  

Joining me: Anand Giridharadas, author of  “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World” and CNBC Wealth Editor Robert Frank.

Facebook is worth almost a half trillion dollars. It has more than 2 billion users who log in at least once a month. It has a famous CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, hailed in Silicon Valley as a Bill Gates for the Internet age – the suburban Harvard kid who dropped out of Harvard to start a company and change the world.  

Facebook also has problems. Its once non-controversial mission of connecting the world has taken a dark turn. Connecting the world to what, exactly? After the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and controversies over how Facebook gave partners access to user data, there’s a question hanging out there. Is Facebook unwittingly connecting the world to too much misinformation, political manipulation, or worse? Or does the good that happens on Facebook outweigh the bad? 

With me this week: Roger McNamee. He’s an early investor in Facebook. He’s an early adviser to Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook has made him a lot of money. And he’s the author of a new book out this week: “Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe.” He says Facebook is bad for America.  

Also with me: Antonio Garcia Martinez, former Facebook employee, and author of “Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley.” He does not think Facebook is bad for America.  

Apple this week pulled a Facebook app from the App Store. It’s called Facebook Research, and its purpose was to let Facebook watch everything that users did on the phone. Apple says the snooping app is too invasive, even if users had consented to letting Facebook watch their every move.  

Which raises the question: How much social media is too much? Are we giving these platforms too much data? Are we posting stuff too quickly without thinking about it? Is it time to step back? 

With me this week, Farhad Manjoo, a New York Times columnist who recently wrote a column about the response to the controversy around Covington Catholic students, and how that inspired him to change his Twitter behavior.  

Also with me, Jeff Jarvis, professor at the City University of New York and longtime journalism commentator. Chris Moody is a former data strategy VP at Twitter, currently a partner at investment firm Foundry Group. And later, Jaron Lanier, noted computer scientist, and researcher at Microsoft.  

He did this the hard way – grew up playing guitar in a band, skipped college, became an accountant by testing into the profession and, after he got into the corporate world, made a lateral move into marketing. He is Andy Mooney, the CEO of Fender Musical Instruments Corporation. 

Mooney and Fender are trying to change the way we look at musical instruments, and the process of buying one and learning to play. It all made sense after he told me his role in the Disney Princess concept becoming a global marketing phenomenon.

Also: The game has changed. It used to be, a movie was valuable if it had a big showing at the box office, though there was the occasional film that did big rental business but didn’t do much in theaters. For more on that, see the entire careers of Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen after Full House. And then for TV, much of the same: A show is big if it gets people to watch commercials or buy cable.  

Scott Belsky didn’t drop out of college, didn’t go straight into being an entrepreneur – he had an idea about what a certain group of customers needed, and he kept tweaking his approach until he built the right thing. That thing, Behance, is a professional network for artists. Kind of like a LinkedIn for visual people. He sold it to Adobe for $150 million. That in itself is pretty cool. But maybe more impressive is what he’s done since. He helped kickstart Adobe’s move to software at a service and invested early in a bunch of hot startups like Uber, Pinterest, Warby Parker and Sweetgreen. Now he’s back at Adobe, leading the development of creative cloud products. 

Scott Belsky is the author of The Messy Middle, a book about the challenges between starting something and declaring it a big success. I loved this conversation. Here’s Scott Belsky. 

The Consumer Electronics Show, CES, is how tech starts the year. It’s a massive event in Vegas with halls full of booths, wall-to-wall people, and companies competing to convince the world that they own the future.  

Julia Boorstin and I were there for CNBC, interviewing executives, taking in the news, now we’re going to break down what it all means. 

This year there is no single hit product to take over for the smartphone. And unlike the past few, there’s no contender. We know drones aren’t really going mainstream. Virtual and augmented reality aren’t either. Artificial intelligence is fun, and 100 million Alexa-powered devices have been sold by Amazon and its partners, but no one’s getting rich off of selling voice-powered devices.  

At the same time, we’ve got 5G, fifth-generation wireless on the horizon, and big ideas like autonomous driving and quantum computing. Julia and I got into all of that in Vegas.

Wellness, fitness, nutrition – all of it is getting a makeover in this age of mobile tech.  

Now you can book doctor appointments on an app, get your blood drawn and the results back in 20 minutes. You can give your doctor access to your genetic code and get truly personalized service.  

Your stationary bike can connect to the Internet to motivate you.  

But how much is too much? And what are the best services to check out?  

We have got just the show to kick off the year, whether you do resolutions or not. Joining me today, CNBC reporters Chrissy Farr and Diana Olick. And I’m thrilled to have WW CEO Mindy Grossman here with me. What’s WW? It’s the artist formerly known as Weight Watchers. 

The economy is in a very odd place right now. The overall numbers are great in the United States. Unemployment is low, growth is decent, several companies have been raising the wages of blue-collar employees.  

But at the same time, stable, full-time jobs with benefits can be hard to come by. To make ends meet and improve their quality of life, lots of people are joining the gig economy, or doing other kinds of temporary work.  

These observations about the state of work and the economy led me to a conversation with Stephane Kasriel, the CEO of Upwork. Upwork is a digital platform where people who have skills can put those skills out for hire, either by the project or on a longer-term basis. I met Stephane at CNBC’s Productivity at Work event, where he gave a talk about how employment is changing. We took it further, to talk about geopolitics, his journey as an executive, and what today’s workers need to know to seize control of their careers. 

When Intel found itself without a CEO, the board of directors turned to Bob Swan, the chief financial officer, to keep the company running. That was six months ago. A few days ago Swan and I sat down at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York to discuss a tumultuous year, an ongoing transformation, his path to the top of corporate finance, and more.

But first, on the Fortt Knox live show this week, it’s the most expensive purchase many of us even consider: a place to live.  

As we head into 2019, a complicated landscape in real estate: For a decade in a rebounding U.S. economy amid cheap loans, home prices have marched steadily higher. When the market bottomed in February 2009, the median sale price for a home was $140,000. Last month it was nearly $258,000. 

That might sound OK if you’re looking to sell a home, but not so fast: Interest rates are creeping higher, reducing how much buyers can borrow. And the number of homes for sale is rising, giving shoppers more homes to choose from. Are we heading into a healthier housing market? Or a more dangerous one? 

Joining me to talk real estate I have the very best: CNBC’s Diana Olick, Realtor.com CEO Ryan O’Hara, and real estate agent Josh Flagg of Bravo’s Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles. Season 11 kicks off January 3.

As 2018 draws to a close, a panel of journalists looks back at some of the defining controversies of the year. Digital data became a flashpoint as more people considered the implications of smartphone apps that literally track our every move. Digital fun came into question as parents heightened their concerns about kids glued to screens. And digital money experienced a crash, as the price of a Bitcoin dropped from nearly $20,000 to less than $3,500.

Ina Fried of Axios, Ed Lee of the New York Times and Josh Lipton of CNBC join Jon Fortt to explore how those issues played out in 2018, and what's likely next in 2019.

Keith Block spent a long career at Oracle before joining Salesforce five years ago. This summer he became co-CEO alongside Marc Benioff, the company’s chairman and cofounder.  

I spent time with Block at CNBC’s Capital@Work event this week in San Francisco, talking strategy, his background, and more. 

Plus: Not many people are getting a cloud for Christmas. But … chances are a lot of the stuff you do get is going to require that you buy online storage sometime down the line. You’ve got to back up those holiday photos and videos eventually, in case your hard drive fails or your phone gets lost, or just to free up space! 

So. Today we talk cloud, to save you money. Joining me to break it down, Rob Marvin is Associate Features Editor at PCMAG.com. Jefferson Graham is a tech columnist for USA Today. And Jordan Novet is a tech reporter for CNBC.com.

Andy Jassy started the cloud business at Amazon, and still runs it. As AWS re:Invent, Amazon's annual cloud conference, I talked to him about Amazon's cloud strategy, global tech momentum, rivalries with other tech giants, and more.

Max Levchin learned to write code out of necessity. His mother's necessity, specifically.

Levchin co-founded PayPal, reaped a windfall from its IPO and sale, and became one of the best-connected investor/entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. But before all that, he was a teenage refugee from the Soviet Union, figuring out how to make his mark at the dawning of the consumer Internet era.

Before the family had left Ukraine in the early 1990s, Soviet officials had given Levchin's mother a poorly translated programming manual, a PC, and a mandate: Learn to program it. Mother and son took turns reading each other the manual, and by the time they moved to the U.S., both knew how to code.

KIND Snacks today is a business valued in the billions of dollars, but this wasn't Daniel Lubetzky's first food company. That would be PeaceWorks – a venture with the lofty goal of bringing Jews and Arabs together through mutually beneficial trade.

What they have in common is a strong sense of mission. KIND bars come in mostly clear packaging, intentionally showing buyers exactly what's inside. Lubetzky started out selling $100 worth of bars at a time – he says he now sells more than 1 billion in a year – and he believes in making a simple, straightforward promise about the ingredients inside.

In our conversation for the Fortt Knox 1-on-1 this week, I talked to Lubetzky about how his family's legacy as Holocaust survivors informs the way he thinks about entrepreneurship and mission. He also talks about mistakes he made along the way.

Also in this week's episode:

It’s upon us: the holiday season. I don’t know about you, but I got an email come-on from Amazon about early Black Friday deals the day after Halloween. Talk about scary.  

So: If you’re an entrepreneur, how do you break through the noise this holiday season? If you’re a shopper, how will you get the best deals?  

Joining me to untangle this retail riddle I’ve got a great panel of experts:  

Adam Glassman is creative director at O Magazine, and has been preparing for this season for more than six months. Stephen Sadove is former chairman and CEO of Saks, and an adviser to Mastercard. And Lauren Hirsch is a retail reporter with us at CNBC.com.

The theme this week is "underdogs." John Chen has history in this department: His parents escaped communist China to Hong Kong, and his father had to work jobs beneath his education level so Chen could have a shot at a better life. At age 17 he came to the United States to finish high school. After he entered the workforce, Chen hit a roadblock. It wasn't common at the time for engineers to get promoted into broader management positions, and he was still growing in his comfort with communicating as a leader in English, his second language.

Fast-forward to today, and Chen has been CEO of BlackBerry for five years. He has taken the company from a dying smartphone maker to a stable provider of security and automotive software. And it's not Chen's first turnaround; after becoming CEO of Sybase in 1998, he led a reinvention that saved the company.

In all of my years covering Chen, I'd never heard his personal story. For the Fortt Knox 1-on-1 this week, I finally get to the root of why Chen is so comfortable playing the long game when it comes to leadership ... and how it ties back into the sacrifices he saw as an immigrant and the son of refugees.

Panera had a problem. At lunchtime, customers were mobbing the counters to order and pick up, and it was a mess. It was frustrating for everyone involved, and management knew they were probably missing out on sales because of it.

The company's founder turned to Blaine Hurst to lead the search for a solution. As the company's chief technology officer, he put together a team to make Panera a leader in digital ordering and fast pickup. First through a website and in-store kiosks and now through mobile ordering and delivery, those tech efforts have paid off. The company now books more than $1 billion worth of digital orders a year, and digital is more than a quarter of total sales.

To talk about how he got there, I sat down with Hurst for this week's Fortt Knox 1-on-1. The answer isn't what I expected. There was no getting buy-in from across the company about what the problem was before the team crafted a solution. And now that he's the CEO and not the CTO, he's had to shift his methods somewhat.

Plus:

Richard Freed is a child and adolescent psychologist, and the author of Wired Child: Reclaiming Childhood in a Digital Age; he joined me from San Francisco. Anya Kamenetz is lead education blogger for NPR, and author of The Art of Screen Time: How Your Family Can Balance Digital Media and Real Life; she joined me in New York. And Katherine Omerod is a social media influencer and author of Why Social Media Is Ruining Your Life; she joined me from London. In our conversation I got feedback and a few pointers on how other parents can set boundaries. Be a friend and share this episode with a parent you know.

Luis von Ahn is familiar with the idea that education is a great equalizer, but the reality he’s observed is different. More often than not, the opportunity for an exceptional education is available only to the wealthy – and it makes them even wealthier. 

So what can be done about it? 

Von Ahn was born in Guatemala, where much of the population is poor. So after he struck it rich selling a company to Google, he decided to build technology that really does address the wealth gap, by targeting one type of education that does make a difference: language. 

That was the genesis of Duolingo. Today, it has touched 300 million users, and has both ad-supported and subscription versions. 

This week, Canada legalized pot. That’s a big deal because it’s the largest country to do it, and because it’s a major milestone in one of the most impressive rebranding exercises in a generation. When I was growing up, many warned against marijuana as a gateway drug, the province of hippies and slackers. Now it’s becoming a multi-billion-dollar global industry, and Elon Musk is toking during a podcast. Seems like an appropriate time to polish off that old meme: “We would like to congratulate drugs, for winning the War On Drugs.”

For the Fortt Knox 1-on-1 this week, I bring you my conversation with Sam Shank, cofounder and CEO of HotelTonight. That business is another example of seizing the moment. Shank had achieved smaller success with a travel technology businesses in the past, but this one was timed to a revolution when it came to life eight years ago. The idea: a smartphone app that finds you last-minute deals on hotel rooms. At first, you couldn't book any further out than a week in advance.

The concept has evolved significantly since then. Today, it’s not just on smartphones, and you can now book three months in advance. The startup has raised more than $100 million. Shank has some advice for aspiring entrepreneurs, intriguing insights into why HotelTonight needed to start the way it did, and an update on the prospects of an IPO for the company. 

Arnold Donald has led cruise company Carnival for five years – the company is now worth $40 billion. Before that, Donald had a long career at Monsanto. His path to the top of a publicly traded company is unique. He's one of the few African American Fortune 500 CEOs, and rose to his position from roots growing up in segregated Louisiana in the 1950s and '60s.

Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategies joins on how to buy a PC in 2018.

Pandora co-founder Tim Westergren joins to talk the future of subscriptions online.

We’ve got a fascination with founders in our culture – people who start stuff. Elon Musk. Jeff Bezos. Bill Gates.  

I’ve had a new generation of founders here on Fortt Knox: Stitch Fix founder Katrina Lake, and Guild Education founder Rachel Carlson to name a couple. 

So this week we’re going to dig into what successful founders do right, and what we can learn from them. Because hey: The way I look at it, even if you’re not starting the next Apple, the chances are pretty good that a lot of us have started something, or will before too long. Maybe it’s a small business – a major project on your job.  

My guests: CNBC Wealth Editor Robert Frank, who has chronicled the ways of successful entrepreneurs for many years now. And the irrepressible Scott Galloway, Professor at NYU’s Stern School of business, author of New York Times bestseller The Four, which examines the animating ideas behind Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon.

This week for the Fortt Knox one-on-one I’ve also got Maynard Webb. He’s former Board Chairman at Yahoo, former CEO of LiveOps, chief operating officer at eBay, and board member at Visa and Salesforce. 

Three new iPhone Xs and a watch that's a cleared medical device: That's what Apple announced at its biggest event of the year.

But what does it mean for Apple? Which, if any, of this stuff is worth buying?

Jon Fortt breaks it down with Christina Farr, CNBC.com health reporter who has been breaking stories left and right on Apple's health advancements; Jillian Manus, Silicon Valley venture capitalist, and CNBC tech correspondent Josh Lipton.

Big week for social media.

Colin Kaepernick tweets his new Nike ad, Nike retweets, and it’s on. Did Nike just make a big mistake, or did it lock in the loyalty of a valuable customer base?

Plus, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey go to Capitol Hill and … I know what you’re thinking, no, Dorsey didn’t go for a Civil War battle reenactment, though with that beard he’d make a dashing Rufus King – I’m just saying – with a bow tie? That’s fresh.

No, they went for a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, to talk about what they’re doing to make sure foreign powers aren’t futzing around with our Midterm elections, which are coming up in just two months.

This is Fortt Knox, rich ideas and powerful people. I am Jon Fortt of CNBC.

Charles Duhigg, Pulitzer Prize-winning contributor to the New York Times Magazine joins me; he has covered the legal upheaval coming to the social space. And Ellen Pao, CEO of Project Include, former CEO of Reddit, and canary in the “Me Too” coal mine joins us.

The economy's supposed to be really good, if you look at the official numbers. According to the U.S. labor department the unemployment rate was under 4 percent in July, which is a level that a lot of people used to consider "full employment." Everybody who wants a job has one.  

Except … not really. 

The system isn't working the way it's supposed to for working people. Here's what I mean. Typically in the past, when so many people have jobs, pay goes up. I mean, how else are you going to get people to work for you if everybody has a job. You've got to pay them more.  

But that's not happening – at least not anywhere near at the level it should be. The Labor Department reported last month that if you look at median weekly earnings, and you factor in inflation, the typical worker is just treading water.  

And what about the future? Having a job and making a living are not the same thing. The cost of a four-year degree rose about 25 percent in the last decade according to the College Board, to $34,740 a year. Meanwhile student loan debt Is exploding.  

So: wages flat. Traditional schooling expensive. We haven’t even talked about the cost of raising a family if that’s your thing. What are you going to do if you’re not already in the job you want to be doing for the rest of your life? 

Today we’re going to find the smart way to navigate all this. Getting the skills for a better job or higher pay without crushing your bank account and going deep in debt.  

Welcome to Fortt Knox, rich ideas and powerful people. I am Jon Fortt at the Nasdaq Marketsite in New York’s Times Square.  

Joining me on the show today to help you make your plan: Here with me at the Nasdaq, Laura Pappano is an education reporter who lives and breathes this stuff, writing in the New York Times, the Hechinger Report and more.  

Joining us from Denver, Rachel Carlson cofounder and CEO of Guild Education, a company that helps employers offer education as a benefit to employees, kind of like healthcare – clients include WalMart, Lowe’s, Taco Bell and Chipotle.  

And finally, joining us from Cambridge Massachusetts, Anant Agarwal is an MIT professor and CEO of EDX, a free-to-learn platform.

The conversation with Harman CEO Dinesh Paliwal begins at 27:58. 

Free speech is getting exhausting. It’s a game of online publishing whack-a-mole as wingnut Alex Jones, of Infowars fame, finally gets suspended from Twitter, only to direct his audience to Tumblr. How should those of us who still love America feel about the amount of crazy that’s going on in the media game these days? 

MoviePass is testing its business model … on Solo. Borrowing a page from Darth Vader’s Cloud City book of negotiating tactics, movie theater subscription company MoviePass is altering the terms of your deal – pray they don’t alter it further.  

And skinny bundles are the new skinny jeans. In further evidence of a trend I like to call “The Great Rebundling,” digital distributors and content companies are hooking up faster than you can say, “Ban Alex Jones.” The latest to swipe right on each other: Verizon doing a deal for free Apple Music and Samsung doing a deal to pre-load Spotify on all its devices.  

Last but not least, for the Fortt Knox one-on-one this week I’ve got Dinesh Paliwal, CEO of Harman International, the high-end audio company Samsung bought for 8 billion dollars last year. He’s talking straight about the future of music formats and the right way to play business hardball with China.  

Welcome to Fortt Knox, rich ideas and powerful people. I am Jon Fortt at the Nasdaq Marketsite in New York’s Times Square.  

Joining me on the show today to break down the headlines: I’ve got Ed Lee of the New York Times. Dan McComas, former senior vice president of product at Reddit. And joining me a bit later, Brent Lang, the senior film editor at Variety; and Cherie Hu, columnist at Billboard.

I've got something different for you this week: A big conversation about work. As in, where should you work? What kind of company: Big or small? Young or established? 

The idea for this episode came from my CNBC colleague Sharon Epperson, who's just great. Sharon covers personal finance, and I'll often stop at her desk and strategize about work and life.  

 Sharon did a piece on how to land a job at a startup, and I wanted to expand the topic to, should you take a job at a startup, even if you can? So I huddled with CNBC producer Evan Falk, as I do every week to talk about Fortt Knox Live, and we decided to put a show together. Get Sharon, a couple of top-flight venture capital investors, and I wanted to get some students and recent graduates, too. I mean, they're the target audience for this stuff, right? 

So that's what we did.  

One more thing, and this is important: So we're about two years into Fortt Knox, and it's grown a lot – I want to thank you, the podcast listeners, and also the live show viewers on all our platforms including Facebook, Periscope, YouTube, and the CNBC apps on Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV. For the past two years, I've been basically working on two different shows: The Fortt Knox Podcast, here … and Fortt Knox Live, which streams on Wednesdays. The podcast is mostly one-on-one interviews, and the live show is mostly broader conversations tackling technology, society and culture.  

My guests are two venture capitalists: Jeff Richards, managing partner at GGV Capital, and Graham Brown, partner at Lerer Hippeau. Three students: Ahmad Eshghyar, an MBA candidate at Yale; Roni Barak Ventura, a doctoral candidate at NYU; and Raymond Willey, an MBA candidate at Baruch College. And one CNBC colleague, Sharon Epperson.

Pandora, the music streaming service, has a culture that's heavily musical. So as a new CEO of the company, it helps that Roger Lynch not only plays guitar, but he actually still plays live gigs with a band. 

Lynch sat down with me above the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, before the opening bell. He's been in the job for less than a year – and he's got his work cut out for him. Spotify just went public, and has grabbed a lot of attention. Meanwhile, many of the most powerful companies in tech are competing with him in the market, including a few little names like Apple, Amazon and Google. How does he plan to win? 

Lynch started out a scientist, became and investment banker, and found his groove as an entrepreneur – he's the founding CEO of video streaming pioneer Sling TV. 

George Kurian is the CEO of NetApp, a storage technology company whose stock market value is more than $20 billion. Normally I like to start off talking about what makes my guests unique. But in this case, George has a lot in common with another Silicon Valley tech executive named Kurian – his twin brother Thomas is president at Oracle. 

George and I could spend a lot of time talking about how unlikely it is that anyone climbs to the top level of a multi-billion-dollar Silicon Valley tech company, much less that two brothers would do it. We did talk about that a bit. But we also talked about strategy, and the challenges he's faced leading in a period of rapid change. 

I sat down with George Kurian at the New York Stock Exchange, three years into his tenure as NetApp CEO. 

Nothing is forever. Especially when it comes to running a multi-billion-dollar public company. This week, in a Fortt Knox podcast special, we're going to do a little retrospective … interviews with CEOs who, for now at least, are no longer CEOs. 

I've been doing this podcast for more than a year and a half, so I've sat down with dozens and dozens of top executives, founders and entrepreneurs. Inevitably, change happens. Sometimes the company's board of directors wants a new strategic direction. Sometimes power struggles erupt. Sometimes personal failings come to light.  

This time, the lessons from the highest achievers come with an asterisk. Just because you reach the top of an organization doesn't mean you'll stay there. I would add another: Just because these execs are no longer in their old jobs, don't assume they're done. When Steve Jobs was shoved out of Apple in the '80s, he went on to found NeXT, build Pixar, and return to Apple. Mark Hurd was ushered out of HP and landed what turned out to be a better gig at Oracle. 

We start with Brian Krzanich, who was CEO at Intel until three weeks ago. That's when Intel's board of directors learned he'd had a relationship with an Intel employee that violated company policy. I got to know Krzanich when he took over the CEO job from Paul Otellini. Brian likes to be called BK, and I quickly learned that he's most comfortable holding onto his identity as an engineer rather than thinking of himself as a corporate executive. The most memorable part of my conversation with him in January 2017: When he revealed a different kind of mistake earlier in his career that almost cost him his job at Intel.

Mark Fields is another executive who'd spent a long time at his company and climbed to the top before his exit. The bottom line on his departure: The stock wasn't doing well, and some within the company lost patience. Fields was in the CEO seat about three years, and my CNBC colleague Jim Cramer thinks he wasn't given enough time to really make his mark. When Mark and I talked in April of last year about his path to the top of Ford, he said he developed a reputation for volunteering to tackle big problems: 

Speaking of boardroom drama, Qualcomm right now has one of the most dizzying situations in techland. The company's locked in a legal battle with Apple over patent payments, it just fended off a hostile takeover attempt from rival Broadcom with an assist from the U.S. federal government, and former CEO and chairman Paul Jacobs – the son of founder Irwin Jacobs – left the board and is trying to raise money to take the company private. Paul Jacobs sat down with me in June of last year and talked about his commitment to Qualcomm. If you think he might give up his fight where the company's concerned, just listen to this: 

Sir Martin Sorrell built WPP by putting together various ad firms and PR businesses into an empire the likes of which the industry had never seen. He resigned from the company in April with allegations swirling about personal misconduct and misuse of company resources. He has denied those allegations, and is in the process of relaunching his career with a new venture called S4 Capital.

Digital fraud is a big business. The same trends that are powering the cloud computing era – global brands, pay-per-use pricing, open-source collaboration – are making thieves rich, too. 

Michael Reitblat is fighting that trend. As co-founder and CEO of Forter, he's trying to keep retailers from getting fooled by credit card scammers. It's a journey that began when he was a teenage hacker, through college and startup dreams, to working on his second startup.  

At the Nasdaq Marketsite I talked to Reitblat about the state of organized crime online, and what innovators can do about it. 

Tobi Lütke is the founder and CEO of Shopify, a public company worth $17 billion. The shopping landscape is changing fast, with new tax laws, same-day delivery, in-store pickup and mobile payments adding new twists and capabilities all the time. Lutke, and Shopify, provide technology tools to simplify all that for merchants. 

I talked with Lütke recently at the Nasdaq Marketsite in Times Square, as talk of tariffs and taxes are swirling. We talked about what's allowed Shopify's stock to double in a year, and how he went from a teenage German apprentice to a Canadian entrepreneur … who's now a billionaire on paper, by the way.

Q-Tip. The Abstract. He’s not going to say it about himself outside of the the playful banter of a rhyme, so I’ll say it: He’s one of the most recognizable voices and influential minds in the history of hip-hop music.   

Q-Tip is probably best known as part of A Tribe Called Quest, a group that emerged in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Hits like “Can I Kick It?” “Scenario” and “Bonita Applebum” cemented Tribe’s place as innovators, both in their lyrical cadence and the way they used sampling and a broad mix of musical genres to make something new.  

A Tribe Called Quest released its final album in November 2016. Member Phife Dog, Malik Taylor, passed away from diabetes complications earlier that year. I talked to Tip about his new music, his other creative efforts, mourning Phife, and the state of the music business.

Few companies have gone through the kind of image transformation GoDaddy has over the past decade. 

Back in 2005, GoDaddy launched its first commercial that used women in revealing outfits and sexually suggestive themes to sell web services. Wagner became GoDaddy's CEO at the beginning of this year, and those commercials are long gone.  

Today's GoDaddy bears little resemblance to the one of a decade ago, which is probably a good thing given how cultural winds have shifted. I talked to Wagner about his journey to the CEO seat, and what he's working to do with the products and culture.   

I got some time with Scott Wagner at the Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. We talked about leadership, culture, and what it will take for small businesses to thrive in this latest wave of the digital economy. We also streamed the conversation live on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the CNBC apps on Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV.

Today it's a $4-billion publicly-traded company. It's synonymous with streaming video, going head-to-head with Apple, Amazon, Google and lately Netflix, in the cord-cutting era. But Roku's been around for more than 15 years. That means it's older than YouTube. 

Anthony Wood, the founder and CEO, hasn't followed a straight line to get Roku where it is. He's gone through a few different business models. He got some help from Netflix. Now he's defying the odds and talking about Roku's latest strategic moves.

I met Anthony Wood at Roku's New York office in Midtown Manhattan. We talked about his journey as an entrepreneur – from selling used golf balls as a kid to his big move to Silicon Valley. He also gives his take on what's next in this golden age of TV.

A little more than 40 years ago, there was a live event that changed television forever. Muhammad Ali vs. Joe Frazier. A boxing match: "The Thrilla in Manilla."

But the men in the ring weren't the only ones with big career stakes on the line. A 30-year-old entrepreneur named Kay Koplovitz had waited about a decade for this moment. She was the driving force behind making the fight the first live satellite broadcast. It changed the cable industry forever, and laid the groundwork for her to become the first woman to head a television network – one she launched two years later – USA Network. 

Kay Koplovitz today is a venture capital investor, a board member, and an advocate for women in business. I got some time with her on a busy day at the Nasdaq Marketsite in Times Square to talk about her journey, and lessons for the rest of us who – maybe in our jobs, maybe with some new venture – are trying to do what's never been done. 

Sometimes Plan A doesn’t work out. You’ve got to be ready to improvise. 

That’s one of the themes in Bastian Lehman’s story. He had a different career path in mind, but ended up settling for entrepreneurship. So far it’s going pretty well. He’s the cofounder and CEO of Postmates, a delivery startup that’s part of this race to remake the way we shop. He's raised about a quarter billion dollars.  

Postmates was originally supposed to be doing furniture delivery. That didn’t work out for some interesting reasons. When I sat down with Bastian Lehmann at the New York Stock Exchange, I got a fresh appreciation for why the ability to make smart adjustments is often better than being able to divine the future. 

I’ve never had a repeat guest on Fortt Knox in the year and a half I’ve been doing this. That’s not because there’s a rule against it, I just never had a compelling reason to.  

That changes this week.  

A few days ago I flew out to Seattle and then went up to Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, and sat down with CEO Satya Nadella. Satya was my guest in October, when his book "Hit Refresh" came out. It was a big deal because Nadella has dramatically changed the perception and trajectory of one of the world's most iconic companies, and most people had no clue who he is. "Hit Refresh" was his big moment of public definition, both for his vision for Microsoft and for himself as a leader. 

Satya wasn't new to me, though. We first met about seven years ago, before he was CEO, on one of his trips to Silicon Valley. I was CNBC's tech correspondent, he was in charge of Microsoft's Server and Tools division, which at the time most people outside of the tech industry thought was a boring backwater. The bright spotlight was on phones, PCs, Xbox, even search. Little did the masses know that the future was in cloud, and Satya Nadella's division would keep Microsoft relevant. 

So – fast forward to today, May 2018. Microsoft has its Build developer conference in Seattle, and Satya took some time ahead of it to talk about his vision for the company's platforms; his chief rivals in the cloud, Amazon and Google; his views on data privacy after Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal; his view on U.S. trade tensions with China, and a lot more.  

A quick correction – when I'm ribbing him in the beginning about his book tour, I say he was in Better Homes and Gardens. It was actually Good Housekeeping. Go figure. 

Vlad Shmunis just wasn't an enthusiastic employee. Didn't like following directions. And he had ideas – lots of ideas. Eventually, something had to give. So the entrepreneurial engineer took a leap, even though family members said he was nuts. 

How'd that work out? Well today, Vlad Shmunis is the founder and CEO of RingCentral, a Silicon Valley company at the intersection of communication and cloud. The company went public just under five years ago. Today it's worth more than $5 billion. 

If you're a long-time Fortt Knox listener, you're going to sense a pattern. Vlad is the third CEO I've had on who grew up in the former Soviet Union and eventually found his way to the U.S. There was Citrix CEO Kirill Tatarinov, Coupa CEO Rob Bernshteyn, and now Vlad. Their stories are all pretty different in key details, but similar in some important core ways, when it comes to education, values and … please listen for this one … the family's approach to risk. 

If you or someone you know is thinking about taking a leap to start your own thing, but you're not quite sure, listen to Vlad's story.

Rafat Ali has done something remarkable in an era where it's really tough to make money telling people the truth. He built and sold PaidContent, a site that covered the digital media revolution with trenchant foresight. And now he's built Skift, an information company focused on the travel and dining industries. 

I sat down with Rafat Ali at the Nasdaq Marketsite in Times Square to get an insider's look at how you revolutionize a crumbling industry. Rafat's a guy whose career I've sort of passively followed as a journalist for a long time. When I was writing for a newspaper in Silicon Valley 18 years ago, I saw him toughing it out on the opposite coast. As he's jumped into entrepreneurial ventures, I leaped from newspapers, to magazines, to broadcast, while crafting my own digital projects. Like Fortt Knox. 

Anyway, part of the brilliance of Rafat Ali is his ability to draw lessons from one industry that are prophetic in another. So even if you're not into media or travel, there's something in here for you. 

GoFundMe is a generosity powerhouse – it's helped people raise a total of more than 5 billion dollars for all kinds of causes and pet projects. Rob Solomon is its CEO. Late last year, Solomon made a bold move – GoFundMe no longer takes an automatic cut of the money people raise. Now GoFundMe itself runs purely on donations. 

Solomon didn't think he wanted to be the CEO of GoFundMe when he first got the offer – he saw people using it to raise money for cat toys – but he soon changed his tune. I talked to him about the future of using tech to do good, the primacy of trust in today's landscape, and his advice for Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, who's facing his own trust crisis. 

Tim Ryan grew up in a working-class family in Boston, where his early jobs included a paper route and a job at a grocery. He’s now the U.S. chairman of PriceWaterhouseCoopers, the global accounting firm known as one of the big 4 auditors. In 2016 it was ranked as the fifth largest private employer in America.  

Whether it’s the changing political landscape, the headaches companies face over protecting data, or getting the right envelopes at the Oscars, PwC handles issues large and small – and a lot of it crosses Ryan’s desk.  

I sat down with Tim Ryan at PwC’s office on Madison Avenue in Manhattan to talk about the challenges facing global business, and his own rise from blue-collar roots to the top level of a company that touches many of the world’s most powerful companies.

This week on the podcast? DoorDash cofounder and CEO Tony Xu. He just raised more than half a billion dollars to build out his business. 

There’s this idea out there that today’s consumers are lazy, and that’s why we're getting stuff delivered all the time. The thing is, I don’t know about you – but the reason why I’m ordering so much delivery is because I’m so busy.  

That’s where DoorDash comes in. The company was cooked up by four students at Stanford four and a half years ago. One of the four, Tony Xu, is the company's 33-year-old CEO. 

Xu was in New York recently after raising a monster round of funding – $535 million. I sat down with him at the Nasdaq MarketSite in Times Square to find out what he's really building, and why he thinks he can beat Grubhub, Amazon, Google, and a lot more rivals lining up to take him on. 

Everybody loves a David and Goliath story. The problem is, in business these days, the David is usually a family business, and the Goliath is some technology-juicing giant. Goliath is usually winning. 

So here's a story that returns to classic form: Danny Govberg is the CEO of Govberg Jewelers in Philadelphia – and he's also the CEO of Watchbox, an app and website that's shaking up the world of luxury watches. By Govberg's count, he's selling at a rate of $200 million worth of watches this year between the two businesses, much of it in brands like Rolex, Patek Phillipe and Omega – brands that run in the thousands and tens of thousands of dollars per watch. And he says he's growing more than 30% a year. 

All of this is happening while the popular narrative is stacked against him. Supposedly hardly anyone wears watches anymore, and for those that do, the Apple Watch and Samsung Watch are running roughshod over the market. Well? That's not the whole story. 

I met Danny Govberg at the Breitling Boutique on Madison Avenue in Manhattan – you'll hear the sounds of the store and some construction next door. We talked about how the business evolved from his immigrant grandfather's beginnings as a watchmaker, and why technology is growing his old family business while it's killing others.

Abe Ankumah had never touched a computer before he arrived at Caltech in 1997, but quickly became captivated and decided to major in computer science. Now he’s the cofounder and CEO of Nyansa, a Silicon Valley startup that monitors the health of wireless networks.

An immigrant from Ghana, raised by hopeful entrepreneurs, he has the kind of story that has fueled Silicon Valley for decades.

I met Abe at the Nasdaq MarketSite in Times Square and talked to him about his journey, and the experiences that paved the way for what he's working on now.

Oren Jacob saw Star Wars as a kid, and fell in love with the idea of bringing together technology and storytelling to create something entirely new.  

Today, he’s the cofounder and CEO of PullString, a tech startup that teaches software how to have conversation. That could mean helping companies build an Alexa skill for Amazon’s Echo, or allowing Hello Barbie to talk.

I caught up with Oren at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, where he spoke to leaders in the tech world about laying the groundwork for the future of voice interaction with computers.  

He told me how his early fascination with Star Wars led him to an internship and first career at Pixar – before he decided to start his own thing.

Boutique treats and toys for dogs, it turns out, are a big business. Bark was co-founded by Matt Meeker, who's now its CEO. It's the seller of the subscription BarkBox. And it expects to do a quarter billion dollars in sales in 2018. 

Americans spend about $70 billion a year on their pets; that’s part of the reason why General Mills just announced that it plans to pay $8 billion for pet food maker Blue Buffalo. And it’s part of the reason why I went to see Matt Meeker at Bark’s headquarters in New York City’s Chinatown, and learn how he saw this pet-pampering mega-trend coming six years ago.  

When you’re pursuing a big idea, it’s important to keep refining it, and questioning your assumptions. That’s one of the things I took away from Matt’s story.

Frugality is baked into Rob Bernshteyn’s life experience. His family immigrated from Russia when he was a kid, and he used savings from a paper route to start a baseball card business … which helped pay for his college education. In his mid-30s, after an executive role at SuccessFactors, a tech company that went public, Rob’s entrepreneurial itch became overwhelming, and he used his modest IPO windfall to launch Coupa.

Coupa’s mission? What else — help businesses save money through smart software. 

Rob and I met at the Nasdaq Marketsite in Times Square to talk about how far Coupa’s come — it’s now a public company worth $2 billion — and how he got there.

Who doesn't like to eat? Maybe my seven-year-old … he'd rather talk at the table … but the rest of us, when we're hungry, want something right now, and something that's not going to induce a lot of guilt. 

That, in a nutshell, is what has given birth to the fast casual movement over the past 20-plus years, and this week, I want you to join me for my conversation with the father of fast casual, Ron Shaich. Before there was Chipotle or Dig Inn, there was Panera Bread. Founded in Missouri in 1987, it now boasts more than two thousand locations. But Shaich, one of the founders, was selling cookies when he first got into the restaurant business. And he's got some insights to share about the journey.

I got some time with Ron Shaich to talk technology, and quality, and wages, and more. We had half of this conversation on Fortt Knox Live, which you can catch Wednesdays at 2 pm, and see by the way on YouTube, and the CNBC app on Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV. Also, Ron and I kept the conversation going exclusively for this podcast, so there are parts that are new here, even if you watched live.  

Kaz Hirai has been the CEO of Sony for six years, and the company just announced that he'll be stepping aside and taking the title of Chairman in April. 

That means he's been the CEO at Sony for much of time that I've been at CNBC. And in that span I've sat down with him most every year at the Consumer Electronics Show, a sprawling event in Las Vegas where the world's gadget giants gather every year. 

Funny thing about Hirai – he stepped in to take the reins at Sony at a moment when the sky was falling in on the company. Apple's iPod and iTunes had snatched the digital music mantle away from the Japanese giant, and Samsung had seized Sony’s crown in TVs. Hirai leaves the CEO seat with the company pretty clearly better off than when he started. 

I sat down as usual with Hirai at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, but this time, for both CNBC live and for the Fortt Knox podcast. We discussed Sony's latest products in phones, TV, and the return of that robot dog, Aibo – but I also talked to him about the multicultural life experience that prepared him to be CEO in this turbulent era.  

You don’t have to be playing the markets every day to know that stocks have been doing very well lately – and not just lately, for about nine years now.  

That means you might be hearing a bit more about stock exchanges. Which brings us to my next guest. Adena Friedman is the first woman to lead a global stock exchange. She’s the CEO of Nasdaq, a job she’s held for a year.  

To get there, she’s had to chart a path where there was none. For example, it meant choosing what was right for her family over what seemed like the more obvious career decision – and making it all work anyway.  

I sat down with Adena Friedman – where else? At the Nasdaq, in New York’s Times Square. We talked about the roads not taken, and the new landscape for female entrepreneurs.

Imagine you've worked 23 years at a company, up to the top. You're being groomed to be the next CEO. And then the current CEO tells you – actually, he's not leaving anytime soon. 

That's the position Al Kelly was in nine years ago at American Express. What happened next is a textbook case in how to handle career curveballs. Today Kelly is the CEO of Visa, and has great things to say about Ken Chenault, who’s retiring as CEO of American Express. Kelly also has great insight into what's happening in the world of money, from Bitcoin to Apple Pay. 

I sat down with Kelly recently at the National Retail Federation conference in New York. Visa is a big company, worth more than a quarter trillion dollars, and its technology touches a staggering number of the payment transactions happening around the world. We talk about that – plus his career, which has taken him around some interesting corners. 

Daymond John grew up in Queens, New York. He wasn’t the best student – he would later be diagnosed with dyslexia – but he did have an eye for fashion and a talent for connecting with people. 

Today, you’ll know him as one of the sharks on Shark Tank – a popular show on ABC and CNBC where entrepreneurs pitch their companies to a superstar panel of investors. That show is in its ninth season. Contestants want not just his money, but perhaps more important, Daymond John’s advice and unique connections. 

Daymond John is also out with a new book this month, Rise and Grind, analyzing the key habits of successful people. He sat down with me to tell how he rose from sewing clothes in his mother’s house, to becoming an investor and TV star, and what he’s learning now. 

Whether it’s sports, college, or work at Goldman Sachs, Carter Reum and his brother Courtney have always had a tendency to do things together.  

But it’s still pretty surprising that the two Midwestern guys managed to start a company together selling specialty alcohol … make millions of dollars … and now coach and invest in other entrepreneurs.  

They’ve written a book about it – together, of course. Shortcut Your Startup is available January 16, and tries to turn conventional business advice on its head.  

The Reum brothers don’t have a rags-to-riches story – they grew up outside of Chicago with a dad who was CEO of a manufacturing company and a Mom who had an MBA from Columbia. It is a story of teamwork, invention, and the guts to abandon what’s comfortable – budding careers in finance at Goldman Sachs – to pursue something potentially great. And I think that makes it a perfect story for the start of a new year.  

Success doesn’t usually come along a simple path, and that was definitely true for Shan Sinha. He was raised by a single mom in Texas, fell in love with technology, went to M.I.T., dropped out to do a startup, and … 

Failed. 

He went back to M.I.T. But of course that’s not the end of the story, or he wouldn’t be on this podcast. He got a job at Microsoft, left to start another company, and this time struck gold – by eventually selling that company to Google in 2010. Now he’s the founder and CEO of yet another business – Highfive, a video conferencing outfit that’s breaking new ground.   

I don’t like straight lines. My career hasn’t traveled in one, and chances are, yours hasn’t either. So I love when I get to explore the stories of people who started out at a disadvantage. Or struck out a few times before hitting that home run. That, I can learn from.  

We used to buy things. Remember that? Hard drives, hit singles, our favorite movies. But for now at least, the hot trend is subscriptions.  

Instead of buying hard drives, we subscribe to cloud storage from Amazon, Google, Microsoft or Dropbox. For music there’s Spotify. For movies there’s Netflix. And it seems a new subscription service is born every minute.  

They say that during a gold rush, the surest way to strike it rich is to sell picks and shovels. That’s what Tien Tzuo is doing in this new subscription economy. His company, Zuora, is the engine that powers the subscription process for companies like Box, SurveyMonkey and TripAdvisor.  

I talked to Tien Tzuo about how he founded Zuora, and grew it into a company that’s raised nearly a quarter of a billion dollars and is pushing for more growth. He’s got some unique ideas about managing people, and stepping out on your own.