Apple CEO Tim Cook Interview At The TIME 100 Summit | TIME

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] particularly appropriate about Tim Cook being our pace Center today given our history together and the role that you're playing we're we're talking about innovating with purpose we'll get to innovating I'd like to start with purpose one of the most interesting data points in the evidence about a global collapse in trust in institutions is evidence of a rise in trust in business leaders to fill a vacuum and increasingly you and your peers are being valued on your values whether it's about labour regulation or sustainability or privacy or saving our school and so I I'm curious to hear you talk a little about how you're navigating that landscape of expectation it's been an interesting time period to be a CEO the I've always deeply felt that people should have values a corporation is nothing more than a collection of people and therefore by extension a corporation should have values and so it's not something unique for Apple in a way we've we've always had a set of things that were really important to us and that we felt said something about us and you know part of that is the way we treat the environment a part of that is evangelizing and advocating for public education and privacy before anybody's talking about privacy right this has been at the depths of who we are as a company and I think I tend to think as I look at the world today the issues that we face cannot be addressed solely by government we should not be looking for government to solve all the problems I think it takes the public sector the private sector and academia kind of working together to to solve some of these huge problems climate change it's not gonna be solved by government it's just one example right and so we we readily step up and participate in the in the conversations and and because we think that how we do what we do says as much about us as what we do certain curious given the remarkably polarized moment we find ourselves in nationally and in many cases globally how do you how do you navigate that when when you're in the territory whether it's around the environment or around education where you also have customers you have suppliers you have all sorts of stakeholders shareholders how do you how do you figure out how to avoid the the minefields well having an impact you focus on or what I do I'm not sure this is the right thing but I focus on what's right and decide that first and and then it's more about you know what you do the the issues that we weigh in and on our issues we feel like we have standing and but by standing I mean that we have a legitimate unique position or lens on the issue that we have something to value something of value to say that we're not just a talking head we're just not adding to the giving an opinion so to speak but and so think things that we feel like we have a unique lens or things like immigration things like education things like the environmental protection things like privacy things that are in the human rights area I mean these things are incredibly important to our employees we are a company of immigrants we have 300 plus people that are in the United States on daca and so these issues are deeply personal for us and I think that I would hope that every CEO would stand up and represent their employees and and yes at the end of the day you do upset some people when you when you do this but I got to get wrapped up in a pretzel about who we upset because I think at the end of the day not in the thick of the moment but at the end of the day we'll be judged more by did we stand up for what we believed in not necessarily do they agree with me on everything and and I think people I think still people appreciate that even when they do disagree and you know we've taken some unpopular positions I recognize that but we we do them out of believing deeply that they're right and that we have a unique lens we focus on policies not politics we do not focus on politics and recognize that everything kind of unfortunately these days it tends to break down in that way but we focus on the policy itself not not the politics you know Apple is probably not known to a lot of people in here but Apple doesn't have a pack Apple is probably the only large company I would think or one of the very few that doesn't have a pack I refuse to have one because it shouldn't exist right this should not I think I think the people that should be able to donate are people that can vote right and we should set a limit about what that is and maybe it's from the current limits maybe it's a different limit and it should be transparent and so the oh I never have donated any money to a PAC personally every donation I've ever made is public and so it it can stand the public scrutiny people can decide whether they like it or they don't like it and I do that for my personal self not not for the company the company donates zero to political candidate so of companies upsetting people I'm curious about how you would grade your fellow technology leaders who depending on the audience are either in the process of saving liberal democracy or sinking it I think that there's some serious issues of attack and I think that even though I am deeply a free-market person in mindset and believe that some unexpected things can happen in regulation I think that you have to we all have to be intellectually honest and we have to admit that what we're doing isn't working that in the technology needs to be regulated there are there are now too many examples where the no rails have resulted in a great damage to society and when when things are out in society and they don't represent the true cost then you have to do something about it you either have to reflect it from a cost point of view so that you're you're valuing things properly or you have to regulate it and and and so I think that I've been on the regular kick which surprised even me for a while because I didn't see companies laying the basic rails employed and then refusing to step over those and so I I think that's where we are when you watch congressional hearings on any of the technology related topics how confident are you in the likelihood of us being able to come to a system of smart regulation as opposed to dumb or destructive regulation I'm not confident is the short version of the statement I think that I think this is an example where Europe is most more likely to come up with something the the GDP are isn't ideal but GDP are was a step in the right direction and from this is on the privacy side obviously I don't think it's a save all and all I think there's plenty of things that didn't do that it needs to do but I think it's a step in the right direction and it may be that's sort of the sinner gravity in moving the ball forward in privacy maybe in Europe and that it may eventually come to the US I think in in some cases and I'm a part of this problem in some way personally we wheat in the u.s. we typically either you know business thinks all regulation is bad regulation and therefore there's lots of gravity around not doing something and and I think that's a very difficult tide to work through here but I am hopeful and we are we are advocating strongly for regulation because I see I do not see another path at this point so one of the last times you and I talked you were in the middle of a fight with the Justice Department over privacy and over the right to break into an iPhone where do you see the focus of the privacy fight now because it's moved a long way it has its I think privacy at this point is much more meaningful to mainstream Americans now privacy started being an esoteric kind of thing and people that people that I would talk to if they were in the military they really got it because they fought for our civil liberties and they knew how important that that civil liberties were to the definition of American and so they got it the libertarians kind of got it but when it started getting out into the mainstream America a lot of people didn't really grasp it I think now there's been so many events that it's much more meaningful to the everyday American about what is happening and I think when it begins to affect our democracy and and and so forth it means even more and you get a more visceral response so I think the the subject has come a long way in in America but I still think that all of us including Apple have to continually talk about what it means to the user what it means to the citizen why this is important why the folks that wrote our constitution thought it was so important and how important it is to expression and because because in in the world where everything is totally open people begin to to guard what it is they will say and think about where society goes if we're afraid to tell each other our opinions if we're afraid somebody's listening or watching or monitoring or we're under surveillance if this is a bad thing inherently in a very broad way not to mention the the manipulation that can go on with hitting different groups against each other however you know I'm still I'm still worried some of the tools like encryption our battle was over could the government forced Apple to create a tool that would have put hundreds of millions of people at risk in order to get into a phone and we took the position no the law does not support the government having the authority to do that and I wish that case would have gone to court to be honest it was dropped the day before and now after the inspector general reports have come out our worst fears have been confirmed that it was a very rigged case to begin with and so I think this this was not the government's finest hour I have personally never seen the government apparatus move against a company like it did here in a very dishonest manner and so I I felt like the naive guy that fault things like this didn't happen that they were try to prevent a discussion dialogue a debate going on about this I hope that we've advanced much further than that it hasn't really in the world which made me that much more disappointed by the way that had happened in our country but I do think for the everyday American privacy is materially more important sitting here today in 2019 that it was when we were going through their case when it comes to the power of government to individually target companies this is something we have still seen in different versions in the last couple of years so Tim Apple I'm curious what you could tell us that that might surprise us that you've seen and heard in your dealings with the president you know I would never talk about conversations that I've had with the president I don't think we're going to see the president because I would not do that because I don't think it's proper to do that the things that that I'm passionate about as a leader of Apple is getting daca fixed getting the immigration system working for America including sort of fixing these green card backlogs there we have people that are in 90 plus year backlogs on green cards I mean it's unbelievable essentially a lifetime more than a lifetime for too many people you know I'm trade is very important I think it's good for American I think we have to figure out how it's good for everyone not not just a set of people in America but good for everyone I'm passionate about education and well I was interested in your recent visit with the workforce yet that half of your US employees do not have four-year college degrees yeah it's yet you know but I think I said then and what I've always felt like is when you're founder doesn't have one it kind of says a lot about what people can do without a college education and and I think fundamentally we have as a society gotten too much ingrained in what is the pedigree what is the degree all of this kind of stuff and in lost sight of the humanity in the conversation a bit and and so we're you know we're not pushing on things like this we're out pushing on getting every kid to learn coding we're out pushing that should be like a require I do I think every kid in America or in the world actually should learn to code because I think it's the most important second language you can learn it's a global language and there's no such thing in the world it's the only one and it's a way to express yourself whether your passion is in the sciences or the arts it's a way to express yourself and I think software is is sort of touching our lives everywhere and so I'm not saying everybody needs to become a programmer I'm saying like the basics of mathematics and history and so forth it's a core skill that kids need to have and and equally important in our view is creativity skills creativity as math and science has been recognized as being very important unfortunately the arts have been gutted from too many of our schools and so basic creativity skills are not taught in a lot of a lot of schools so we've designed our own curriculum called everyone can create and we've made it available to all public school are all schools actually in in the world and many many schools are now picking us off it's a way to integrate creativity and the core subjects that they are still teaching math science history and language and Saturday that points to one of the things that is often true of of time 100 that they they end up being on our list not for whatever they first achieved what first brought them wealth and fame or celebrity or importance but a second or third act so I'm curious if why you say Apple might one day be most known as a health company yeah the we started pulling the string many many years ago now first as we the run-up to the watch as it was being created we began to recognize that it was a big idea to monitor your body on a real-time basis versus just going to the doctor once a year and you know having different vital signs checked and and so with the watch we focused initially on wellness and heart and we have last year as you know we launched the series four that has an EKG in it and this is a huge thing because you have the ability to monitor an EKG some people only have one of these in their life it's a book not most people the world have none and so all of a sudden on a device it's on your wrist you can monitor EKG I'm getting tons of nose from all the different countries that we've launched in saying oh my god I found out I had this serious problem I have afib I didn't know it I went to the doctor he or she told me I would have died if this wouldn't if I wouldn't have known this or would have had a serious issue or something I mean this is what the the people are telling me and so I think it's a big idea to monitor your body and as we pull this string more we recognize more and more things that we can do uniquely do it Stanford we just ran the largest heart study in the world ever we had 400,000 people in it think about the way these studies have been run in the in the past you'd go to a bulletin board there would be little phone numbers stuck on it and you pull a phone number off and it takes forever to get any kind of the number of people to join a study now the sudden you can have hundreds of thousands in a study it's amazing and as long as you have the technology and privacy is it's even more important and when you get into the health kind of arena if you're if you're really solid on these things we think that you can increase the learning cycles and be able to make significant contributions to health care over time and so we're at the early stages of this with the watch and I obviously were working on a much more things and I I do think that there will be a day that we will look back and say apples greatest contribution to mankind has been in healthcare I think that will happen maybe the corollary to that could say it's about our mental health is that there's one study that I think said that we typically touch our screens 2160 seven times a day what you shouldn't be doing that I'll see you in competing interests here but you introduced screen time yeah which I which I wondered whether one you think you have an addiction problem or that we collectively do or how we should be thinking about and what led you to introduce that because of this extraordinary relationship we have with devices that you were you know very responsible for making as compelling as they are we think that we know because they told us that some users primarily focused on their kids feel their kids are using a device is too much however as we look at it it's also the parent that using I'm too much right we all are as the many of us are and so what what we wanted to do a police never wanted to maximize user time we've never done about that we're not motivated to do that from a business point of view and we're certainly not motivated from a values point of view what we want to do is give you a tool that empowers you to do things you couldn't do otherwise we want to enable things for your life and it empower you to to have experiences that you couldn't have the it is clear that there are certain apps that people can get in the mindset of just scrolling through mindlessly and continually picking up their phones and looking to see you know what it's getting right at the second or whatever and and so what we did was we looked at this and said okay we're going number one we should make sure people know what they're doing because there's a human trait in all of us to underestimate the degree of something bad we're doing you know if you ask somebody how many calories they had yesterday I bet they're gonna say less than they have if they ask you how much exercise you did they'll probably overestimate it and so what what we're doing is we're giving people the facts here's how much time you spent and here's what you spin it on here's how many times you picked up your phone yesterday and here's how many notifications you got and what what it's done for me and if you guys start doing this if you have an iPhone and you're not doing I would encourage you to really do this is monitor these and what did--what has done for me personally is I've gone in and gutted the number of notifications because I really asked myself do I really need to be getting thousands of notifications a day is that really new crazy yeah I mean maybe that's the reason but you know it's not something that is adding value to my life or it's making me a better person and so I went in and chopped that and the number of this thing well every time you pick up your phone it means you're taking your eyes off whoever you're dealing with our talking with right and if you're if you're looking at your phone more than you're looking in somebody else's eyes you're doing the wrong thing yeah you're doing the wrong thing and so we we want to educate people about what they're doing and we'll you know this thing will will improve and through time just like everything else that we do will innovate there as as we do in other areas and but basically we don't want people using their phones all the time this has never been an objective for us and in yeah well this will be asked today unfolds and in the face of all the temptation this will be a challenge to all of us to keep our eyes thank you temporary what you sure [Applause]

Channel: TIME

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Keywords: Apple CEO Tim Cook, Apple CEO Tim Cook Interview, TIME 100, TIME 100 Summit, Tim Cook Interview At The TIME 100 Summit, Tim Cook Interview, protect privacy in an interview at the TIME 100, TIME 100 Summit in New York, apple ceo tim cook speech, tim cook speech 2019, Time, time magazine, magazine, time (magazine), time.com, news today, world news, interview, science, technology, health, politics, entertainment, business, news, breaking news, live, lifestyle, video, TIME 100 Summit on Tuesday

Id: MU-SXaFpSts

Length: 25min 31sec (1531 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 25 2019