Search Weight Loss Topics:




Dec 12

Tim Cook on Health and Fitness | Outside Online – Outside

Fitness Comments Off on Tim Cook on Health and Fitness | Outside Online – Outside

[Advertisement]

---------------

EPISODE BEGINS

Outside Podcast Theme: From Outside Magazine and PRX, this is the Outside Podcast.

Tim Cook: How are you?

Michael Roberts (Host): I'm good.

Cook: Great to meet you.

Roberts: Thank you so much for making the time this morning.

Tim Cook: My pleasure. I love what you do. Good to meet you.

Roberts: Thank you so much. You too. I appreciate you hosting me here. This is my kind of assignment.

Cook: It's pretty spectacular. It's like working in a park.

Roberts: Yeah. Literally, it is like working in a park.

Roberts (narrating): This is Michael Roberts, host of the Outside Podcast. And today, were going to take a walk around Apple Park with Tim Cook.

Earlier in the fall, Apple had invited me to their headquarters in Cupertino, California, to speak with Cook, the CEO since 2011. Our conversation took place several weeks after the Apple product event where they introduced Series 6 of the Apple Watch. The headline news was the addition of a blood-oxygen sensor. The slogan for the device, according to one promotional video: The future of health is on your wrist.

The other big announcement at the event was the launch of Fitness+, a subscription-based service that will offer guided studio workouts streamed to Apple devices by mid-December. It marked a significant step for the company: they are jumping into the rapidly expanding online training space in a major way.

Tim Cookwho is a fitness obsessive and bit of a nature nerd, who regularly reads Outside magazinewas interested in speaking with me about Apples commitment to creating products that improve our health, as well as Apples environmental initiatives, his love for Americas national parks, and even how we can all learn to put away our devices and just be outside.

Apple Park, which is more than 80 greenspace and has some 9,000 trees, is in fact a really good place to talk about all this.

Roberts: I mean, we were sitting you missed it a few minutes ago. There was there he is. There's a red-tail hawk sitting on the top of a tree there.

Tim Cook: Yeah. Yeah.

Roberts: So obviously, it's working. We were joking if you've staged some deer to run out on the path as we walk along. [laughter] But is that kind of the way to think of it as a

Cook: It's sort of to bring the outside in and the inside out. So people can many people do. They work outside. And they find places where maybe for solitude at some times and maybe for group kind of things in our pre-pandemic world anyway.

Roberts: Right.

Cook: It'll be fairly quiet today when we walk in because we only have about 15 percent, give or take, of the folks working. Everybody else is remote. But the idea of having a home like this in the valley was just unheard of. You know, most people did the skyscraper kind of thing or the typical corporate campus of all these buildings where people never left their building so to speak.

Roberts: With some vision there of efficiency, right? Let's work. [laughs]

Cook: Yeah. I mean, it is very much that old mindset was not around collaboration at all. So we wanted to build a place where people would sort of run into each other. And in a circle, that is the design point.

Roberts: Right. As far as the park goes and you were speaking about how people engage with and I'd be curious to hear like how let's pretend it's not 2020 COVID times.

Cook: Yeah.

Roberts: What does it look like normally if I'm standing here or walking around? What am I seeing? How is the community of Apple employees engaging with this outdoor space?

Cook: You would see people riding bikes along here to get to one meeting to another. You would see people walking. You would see some people exercising, you know, running and so forth because it's a two-and-a-half-mile track around the place.

Roberts: Mm-hmm.

Cook: So you put in a couple of laps in, and you've got a good workout for the day. And you would see people sitting as we get into the inner circle, you would see people sort of spread out and working along tables and over near the pond, some people alone, some people with groups.

Roberts: What about you? Because you're a sort of I think I'll say notoriously busy CEO, [laughter] someone who gets up early and maybe the last guy to turn out the lights every night. This space it's 150 acres. It really is it's pretty incredible just starting at it. What does this like literally and personally mean to you? And how do you use this space?

Cook: This is like working in a national park for me. And it provides that kind of feeling. So you know, we all operate on inspiration and motivation. And you find your somewhere. And the only difference between people is generally what level of insof how inspired they are and how motivated they are to do different things.So nature really inspires me and motivates me as it does the bulk of the people here. If you were to go inside the offices, you would see conference rooms named after national parks. Right.

Roberts: Right. Yeah.

Cook: I'm right around the corner from the Grand Canyon room.

Roberts: Which follows what you do with operating system names too

Cook: Yeah. Absolutely.

Roberts: in recent history.

Cook: Absolutely.

Roberts: So here's the question then.

Cook:Yeah.

Roberts: You have this incredible outdoor space. You have people who are inspired by nature. I wonder if Apple I don't know if it's official or unofficial policy how you encourage your employees to spend time here whether it's you know, because it's one thing to go for a bike ride, and you're staring at your watch. And you're closing some activity loops.

Cook: Yeah.

Roberts: And it's another thing to take an outdoor conference call or meet with a group of people. And it's another thing to say, hey, everyone. Make sure you spend some time out there. And just like don't bring any devices.

Cook: Yeah.

Roberts: Like leave is that something that Apple consciously does? Or is it something that you think people are just choosing to do here on their own?

Cook: It's a combination the two. I mean, we even have monthly activity challenges across the whole of the company to try to get people outside, get people moving, get people exercising. They form teams informally. And they compete.

Roberts: Okay.

Cook: So we do little things like that that plant the seed. We have one caf essentially in the building. So everybody you have a certain amount of activity just to get to the caf.We have a couple of outdoor kind of cafes. But the big caf there's one. Everybody goes to the same place. The restrooms are a reasonable distance from people's area

Roberts: Force them to walk.

Cook: of working. We force them to walk.

Roberts: Yeah.

Cook: You have little coffee bars where people congregate. And these things not only get people moving, but they provide that serendipitous kind of discussion and collision of ideas that bring out innovation.

Roberts: Yeah. And I was just asking about the idea of encouraging people to maybe not take devices with them on a walk because we all know what it's like

Cook: Yeah.

Roberts: whether you're on the street or even in a park where it just changes the relationship to the space. And this is really special. I mean, the investment here by Apple in the natural landscaping is extraordinary.

Cook: It is.

Roberts: So you think about like, okay. This is here. How are we choosing to engage with it? And how are we encouraging, you know, even just your office community here to engage with it?

Cook: Last month or actually, this month it's going on right now we have a meditation challenge where people are being motivated to meditate. There's no better meditation than, in my view, walking out in nature.

Roberts: Yeah.

Cook: You know, it's the ultimate meditation for me. So again, lots of small things like that that get people thinking and hopefully, they're applying that in their own lives too, not just while they're at work but when they're away as well.

Roberts: What about, if we expand it from you and the employees here to the users of your products because I think we all know one of the great challenges of our time is finding ways to really escape, to step away from it all.

Cook: Yeah. Yeah.

Roberts: And a lot of that has to do because, if you have an iPhone with you, it's like the whole world is in your hand, you know.

Cook: Yeah.

Roberts: It's all there.

Cook: It's a window to the world.

Roberts: It is. And it's a portal to the world. So you can be just about anywhere, and the world comes and grabs you. Or you are drawn by this force to engage with it.

Cook: Yeah.

Roberts: So as the CEO of a tech company, which people depend on your products to engage with that world, do you feel a responsibility to those users just like you do to your employees to help them learn how and when to disconnect?

Cook: Very much so. We think very deeply about all the things that we create, about how they're going to be used, how they're going to be used in scale the great ways they'll be used but also the not-so-great ways that they can be used. So an example of that would be screen time. Right. We do not want people using our products too much. We want to create them in such a way people get the most out of them in short periods of time to free themselves up to do whatever it is that they want to do. And so screen time was a way of making all of us aware of how much time we're spending in our technology. And I think including for me personally it was my estimates versus the reality were very different. And I

Roberts: Do you have any numbers you remember?

Cook: They were high. [laughter] They were high. I was but what I did though so the action I took was I started asking myself, why do I need all these notifications?

Roberts: Right.

Tim Cook: Why do I really need this? Do I really need to understand things in the moment that they're happening? And you know and I started taking a meat ax out to some of these things that would grab my attention but didn't need to in the moment

Roberts: Mm-hmm.

Cook: to free me up to do other things. So yeah. I learned like I think like probably most people underestimate how much they're using it.

Roberts: Sure.

Cook: And we've never designed our products to dominate people's lives. That's never been our purpose. It's not our business.

Roberts: Right.

Cook: Our business is to give people tools that enrich their lives and allow them to create something that they couldn't create or do something or, you know, sort of transform themselves in some sort of way. We've never been into this, How long is somebody spending on our property? And let's try to figure out a way to make that as high as possible?

Roberts: Yeah.

Cook: How many clicks can we get? We're not into that business model.

Roberts: Right. But it is the thing is the tool is so impressive, and the design is so alluring. And so that's one part of it. You know, we're naturally sort of people pick it up.

Cook: Yeah.

Roberts: It's why we see people have you know, you find that moment of boredom. And what do people do? They lean into a device. So that challenge of helping your users have that healthy relationship I would suggest that we are still figuring that out and not just Apple.

Cook: I think there's more to do. I think there's more to do. And you know, another example of things that we do is we give parental controls.

Roberts: Right.

Cook: So for those people that are helping address their kids, it's a proactive way for them to have not only a conversation but also to put some rules of the road in. So we have thought deeply about each of these. And we continue to do it. We're not saying we've arrived, and we've got all the answers today. We innovate there just like we innovate with the latest camera system and the latest watch and so forth.

Roberts: Sometimes, I feel like th because I use Screen Time too.

Cook: Yeah.

Roberts: And I noticed right away. I was like, man, you know, I'm doom-scrolling a little on the New York Times here. Like I've got to stop this. And I just got pulled into another random evening of Instagram. Get me out of here. But I had an experience recently that I think got to me the challenge of this which is I was hiking with my family in Point Reyes National Seashore. But it was like three weeks ago.

Cook: It's beautiful.

Roberts: It's beautiful.

Cook: Yeah.

Roberts: Took the phone, threw it in the pack. We're just with the kids, my wife and I. I forgot to put do not disturb on. So like a few hours into the hike there's not a lot of connectivity out there. But all of a sudden, I got some reception. And I heard and felt the buzz in my pack. And it was like, in that moment, everything I had been escaping, work concerns, the news, it was all just I was carrying it emotionally and psychologically. And I was upset with myself for forgetting. And I had that challenge we all have where I didn't grab the phone. I didn't take it out. But there was this gnawing feeling in my head of like, what is that? Did I forget to do something for work? You know, is something the matter? And it took a real effort to quell that.

Cook: Yeah.

Roberts: And to me, that just gets at this challenge and my sense of how early we are on that part of this. I mean, the iPhone has been around since it's relatively new in our relationship to techno

Cook: 2007.

Read the rest here:
Tim Cook on Health and Fitness | Outside Online - Outside

Related Posts

    Your Full Name

    Your Email

    Your Phone Number

    Select your age (30+ only)

    Select Your US State

    Program Choice

    Confirm over 30 years old

    Yes

    Confirm that you resident in USA

    Yes

    This is a Serious Inquiry

    Yes

    Message:



    matomo tracker